I'd say if you're going with the second option, stop, think, then go with the first option. This would mean either limiting your supported systems to recent one

I'd say if you're going with the second option, stop, think, then go with the first option. This would mean either limiting your supported systems to recent ones or limiting the features you use to those available in whatever "enterprisy" (i.e. RHEL / Debian stable / LTS) versions you want to support. If it's a GUI app, there's a good chance you can ignore the enterprisy distributions.