For desktop applications, Flatpak does this. Otherwise, containers or the new "portable services" feature of systemd. Thanks to systemd, there are standardised

For desktop applications, Flatpak does this. Otherwise, containers or the new "portable services" feature of systemd. Thanks to systemd, there are standardised ways of doing a lot of things, but yeah, distributions do vary, so you really need an abstraction, or target just a few of the popular distributions.