KDE attempted to bring OpenDoc-lite style components into itself ~2000 with KParts, while Gnome attempted the same with the CORBA based Bonobo system at the same time. Neither was successful - the true path to inter operating compound documents was the Web with HTML and JavaScript ultimately, but that didn’t start coming into its own until about 10 years later.
At least the IPC idea survived with D-BUS, and they could actually still do it, but the elephant in the room is that desktop fragmentation in Linux world is a big obstacle.
