[MaxBarraclough]

The problems you've described are the reason we have tools like CMake, no? CMake's reusable find modules handle the heavy lifting of coping with the annoying differences between Linux distros, and for that matter other OSs.

> you have an exe that works on your version of Ubuntu

This is indeed a downside of the Linux approach, it's the price we pay for the significant flexibility that distros have, and the consequent differences between them. Windows has remarkably good binary compatibility, but it's a huge engineering burden.

> Tbh i think the only sane-ish way of building to dockerize your build env with baked-in versions.

This is an option, but bundling an entire userland for every application has downsides that the various Linux package-management systems aim to avoid: wasted storage, wasted memory, and less robust protection against inadvertently using insecure unpatched dependencies.

[floatboth]

The de-facto standard for dependency discovery is pkg-config. CMake being its own little world with its own finding system is annoying and part of the reason why the ecosystem has not migrated from autocrap to CMake en masse. Thankfully Meson came along, which does everything correctly.

[jcelerier]

pkgconfig is everything but a standard. It barely works on windows and macOS which are the most common platforms.