CMake works well if you're building typical user space applications or libraries with dependencies to popular and typical libraries that CMake can find or follo

CMake works well if you're building typical user space applications or libraries with dependencies to popular and typical libraries that CMake can find or follow typical conventions. It completely falls apart if you need to do something unusual or automate non-build tasks with it. E.g. building bootable kernel images (where you need a linker script, etc) with CMake is quite painful (I've done it, will not do it again). The best feature of CMake for me has been easy cross compiling so I can develop and remote debug Windows apps on my Linux box.