[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Proprietary application developers pretty much have to do that, because there are no standards between distributions so they have to remain flexible. OSS developers don't bother because, hey, you can just recompile from source! Not that that would actually make your application portable, mind you, you'd just have different hardcoded paths.

If there was a standardized base system and AppImage was embraced for deploying applications, that would make all application developer's lives easier, proprietary or otherwise, and all that wasted effort maintaining out of date applications across distro-specific repositories could stop.