As long as your distro doesn't replace glibc for e.g. musl or bionic, and has all the usual GNU (and X11, and DBus if you need that) userland, i.e. no odd stuff - there is no much difference. Most of the time things just work. Normally, the only time you'll have to "write software for some specific distribution" is when the distribution is unusual in its ways, but you still want to target it.

That is, unless you need to target some specific library version that's higher or lower than the usually available, incompatible with the usual version, and you don't want to have a statically-linked release variant. E.g. something that would work only with Qt5.2 but not with Qt5.6. Don't see why not to just throw it all in a tarball and call it a release. Saw this done many times, I just unpacked it, ran it - and it worked.

And that is if that's you who package your software. Usually, some user just takes it further and becomes a maintainer (or a co-maintainer, or just a volunteer who submits patches).