[michaelmrose]

This seems to be a common complaint as if we were all standing on a life raft pushing it down with the collective weight of our respective keisters.

If only some people would stop contributing to creative work you don't see the value of and distributing it for free on the internet!

At present you have

Debian and a bazillion ubuntu derivatives using a debian package. ubuntu/debian are going to have different versions of some libraries but you can package deps with your app.

Arch and derivatives have a pkgbuild. This is quite simple if anyone cares about your app your arch users will probably upload one for you to the arch user repo.

Fedora and suse have rpms. These will be similar but not identical.

3 packages and you can cover most of your potential users.

In the future you reasonably may expect to be able to distribute a flatpak and be done with it.

[pjmlp]

It is not only about package formats, since even when the format is the same, the expected directory layouts or installed libraries will be completely different.

No one really took FHS seriously, each installation is a special snowflake with its own GUI and dynamic libraries story across Linux variants is even worse than it was on other OSes.