> This is a very good observation I think. Basically, what Linux distributions have failed to do is to create a higher level SDK for their platforms - instead, they rely on a soup of libraries and on the package maintainer model to know which of these is which.

Not really no. It's both simpler and more complicated.

At the very low level, everyone expects to get a POSIX system. At the user level, most users use either Gnome or KDE (well mostly Gnome to be honest but let's pretend) which provides what could be called a highlevel SDK for applications.

That leaves the layer inbetween which used to be somewhat distribution specific but is seeing more and more consolidation with the advent of systemd and flatpak.