The way developers solve this on Windows works on Linux: ship the libraries you need with your application. Steam does this and it works pretty well. Even if yo

The way developers solve this on Windows works on Linux: ship the libraries you need with your application. Steam does this and it works pretty well. Even if you don't, the Linux community will do most of the debugging for you and submit fairly detailed bugs (failed on platform X with error Y, workaround Z produces different error), so all you need to do is interact with the community periodically, fixing the easy issues to keep people happy. For FOSS projects, everything gets easier once you get it accepted in the package repositories, and if your project is popular enough, you can usually get someone else to do it for you. In both cases, using a language that has a cross platform dependency manager eliminates a huge number of compatibility problems. Also, keeping libraries reasonably up to date also helps prevent problems from happening. Updating every two years should be sufficient to maintain compatibility with most Linux distributions. Also, software vendors don't have to worry about every Linux distribution, just pick the top one or two and let users support the rest for you.