@SuperDicq @kaia @grillchen @sun The distros abstract away the problems, because they already patched the packages. The reality is different.

Just to give a few examples for badly behaving programs that don't work properly without mainstream dependencies:
- Firefox (build on a system without dbus; requires somewhat extensive patching)
- systemd v239 (disable seccomp, pam and most unneeded parts; kinda old but still used version (rhel8) - will fail to build because nobody tested it without these two dependencies apparently)
- get network settings working in a desktop environment on a system without NetworkMamager (probably doable on KDE, likely impossible on GNOME)

And from a non-Linux world, Erlang had broken TLS1.3 support detection on systems using LibreSSL basically since it was introduced (fixed a few months ago).