There are a ton more ways that very basic APIs and services can present to the user and to their programs, meaning far more ways for things to break. Way more possible combinations of not just version, but even which library or program is providing some capability.
The closest thing to a solution is picking one of the two big desktop environments and targeting that to give you some amount of consistency and stability, but it's not like people will only run your program in that DE (again, possibly not even in the same window server you developed on) so you may end up with bugs when e.g. your QT/KDE program runs under Enlightenment, plus a ton of basic stuff can still vary a lot even if you restrict support to one DE (think: audio daemon) which may affect all kinds of things in unexpected ways.
> GUI heavy application like chrome, firefox or openoffice run on all districts without any hiccup!
Ever seen a thread full of people exchanging advice on how to get these programs not to exhibit certain widespread glitches on Linux, many of which have been a problem for years? Thinking especially of things like tearing, or multimedia playback problems. They even crop up here on HN from time to time.
The closest thing to a solution is picking one of the two big desktop environments and targeting that to give you some amount of consistency and stability, but it's not like people will only run your program in that DE (again, possibly not even in the same window server you developed on) so you may end up with bugs when e.g. your QT/KDE program runs under Enlightenment, plus a ton of basic stuff can still vary a lot even if you restrict support to one DE (think: audio daemon) which may affect all kinds of things in unexpected ways.
> GUI heavy application like chrome, firefox or openoffice run on all districts without any hiccup!
Ever seen a thread full of people exchanging advice on how to get these programs not to exhibit certain widespread glitches on Linux, many of which have been a problem for years? Thinking especially of things like tearing, or multimedia playback problems. They even crop up here on HN from time to time.