This is completely missing the point - a statically compiled end-user binary should be compatible across all distributions of Linux, using the same version of the kernel or any newer version.
The only caveats to that are (a) hardware and (b) poorly-packaged software.
(A) is the fault of hardware manufacturers and is increasingly not an issue these days anyway; driver issues are becoming increasingly rare.
(B) is easy to solve for any open-source software, as it is the responsibility of the community for that distribution to provide the appropriate packaging. They prefer to do it themselves. And they're good at it - it gets done!
If you want to ship a closed-source binary on Linux, just make sure you don't dynamically link it against any libraries that you don't also ship with the binary. Problem solved.
Honestly, I can't remember one single instance ever where I have run into end-user software that will run on one distribution of Linux and not another, as long as that principle was followed.
Many sophisticated libraries on Linux uses dynamic modules or require components that are configured as part of the system.
Consider D-Bus, if you statically link, but the system changes the format or location of D-BUs configuration files, all of a sudden your app no longer works.
So in theory, yes, this could solve some of the problems. But it requires a massive effort to make the Linux desktop libraries static-linking friendly, which they are not.
Why not just ship a chroot jail to run it in in case some of those statically linked system libraries read config files which might be under a different path or in a different format?
This is completely missing the point - a statically compiled end-user binary should be compatible across all distributions of Linux, using the same version of the kernel or any newer version.
The only caveats to that are (a) hardware and (b) poorly-packaged software.
(A) is the fault of hardware manufacturers and is increasingly not an issue these days anyway; driver issues are becoming increasingly rare.
(B) is easy to solve for any open-source software, as it is the responsibility of the community for that distribution to provide the appropriate packaging. They prefer to do it themselves. And they're good at it - it gets done!
If you want to ship a closed-source binary on Linux, just make sure you don't dynamically link it against any libraries that you don't also ship with the binary. Problem solved.
Honestly, I can't remember one single instance ever where I have run into end-user software that will run on one distribution of Linux and not another, as long as that principle was followed.