It's definitely technically possible to find a hacky combination that works today, but only by shouldering the cost of understanding all the possible deps and symbols and the structure of their underlying objects used by all possible e.g. graphics drivers and X11 libraries now and into the future. You can hack around it today, but it's a fool's game and absolutely not something that can be relied on to continue working in any sound manner, without risking e.g. some memory corruption due to a struct layout difference long in the future, etc.

I wanted to check whether the official Nvidia driver uses C++, but it's not installed on this machine just now, and of course that I even have to check just highlights the problem with this approach.

> I wanted to check whether the official Nvidia driver uses C++,

I don't know for nvidia, but I had a problem two years ago on a machine with a radeon card: I was developing a GUI software which used LLVM at some point. Insta-crash at runtime on this computer whenever I'd oepn a window. The reason ? the radeon driver linked and initialized LLVM which didn't support being initialized twice...

There's no other option, though. If you aren't integrated into the distros' builds, then you have no way of getting your binary updated when a dependency makes an ABI-incompatible change -- much less shipping a single binary that works across all distros. The only reasonable option is to determine a subset of your dependencies which offer long-term stable ABIs, dynamically link those, statically link the rest, and hope for the best.

But there is another option, it was mentioned in the original complaint :)

> So it means for every product, have a build for every distro / version combination you want to support.

Of course it's a total pain in the ass, but it's still vastly preferable to unfixable bugs sometime in the distant future

I'm not sure how per-distro (or distro-version) builds fix the problem, unless you're committing to continuously produce new builds for future distro versions to account for ABI changes. If you can do that, you can also fix issues with static linking if/when the come up.

There's a better solution: don't ship on an OS that insists on being a pain in the ass to ship on.