Comment by hathawsh

Canonical's Snap system is intended to solve this. Snaps are packages that bundle their dependencies, so they are bigger, but they run successfully on most modern versions of Linux.

https://snapcraft.io/

AppImage solves the problem in a different way, although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades like Snap:

https://appimage.org/

I suppose one could put an appimage in a snap, leading to either the best or worst of both worlds.