That may be true of Gnome2 apps, which is a complex layer on top of Gtk2. I try to avoid Gnome2 apps myself.

But plain Gtk2 apps are quite easy to install, and Perl/Gtk2 only need the most basic libs....Cairo, Pango, Glib, and Gtk2, and they install easily on linux. You may have problems, if you don't set the prefix right in the compile options, and you get multiple lib sets, or overwrite a lib needed by some app compiled for you by the distribution's authors.

But if you don't use rpms, and precompiled packages, and compile all your Gtk2 apps yourself, there are very few problems. The only exception is Gtk2 on MS Windows.....that still is pretty bad. The only version available is out-of-date, and won't work with Perl 5.10.

As the number of libs needed by systems increase and become increasingly intertwined, something like Ubuntu is looking good. I, like you, prefer my ICEWM on Slackware, which is almost twice as fast loading and running than Ubuntu; but I really am impressed with the Synaptics package manager, for keeping you up to date, and installing pre-requisite libs when you want an app. For the average computer user out there, who dosn't want to deal with maintaining their own libs, Ubuntu is very good.

Also since Gtk2 has a theme manager, in ~.gtkrc-2.0, you can set large default fonts, and high contrast color themes, which would be enough for most people. Accessibility can mean many things to different people, poor vision, deaf, blind, no limbs, etc.