This is a huge pain if you want to support multiple systems, which most of the biggest products do. But if you (1) choose a single OS, (2) have "few" (say unde

This is a huge pain if you want to support multiple systems, which most of the biggest products do. But if you (1) choose a single OS, (2) have "few" (say under 20) files and (3) rely only on OS-provided libraries, then things are actually pretty simple. For example, you only support Ubuntu 20.04 or Fedora 39. Then your makefiles are nice and easy to read, and you just rely on pkg-config for the libraries.