Historically, there was a large population of FOSS prior to Linux, and its distributions (starting with HJ Lu, SLS, Slackware, etc) were mostly just uniform pac

Historically, there was a large population of FOSS prior to Linux, and its distributions (starting with HJ Lu, SLS, Slackware, etc) were mostly just uniform packaging and easy installation. This wasn’t entirely new: commercial Unix had packaging mechanisms, but lacked the motivation for gratis distribution. Prior to Linux, autotools was a standardization that made installation easy across the many commercial Unix variants. That’s now moved on. There are dozens of packaging and distribution formats, none of which is universally applicable (as the OP says). And users’ expectations have moved well beyond the autotools invocation. It’d be great for both end users and application developers for a universal solution to emerge, but there’s no sign of it happening.