Just a note, I would not use "Ubuntu doesn't even have" as an argument that something is not viable, since Ubuntu has its roots in Debian and there is a tendency to have old crap in the stable release.
For less popular stuff, even the most current release (trusty) is not likely to be kept up-to-date unless one of the core developers is an Ubuntu user. It's not as bad as Debian (used to be?) and I can't come up with an example off the top of my head of something that I needed that was too old and still is, but the most recent memory was Vim, trying to install YouCompleteMe, they had already come out with Vim 7.4 and the most current release of Ubuntu only had 7.3, with about 600 patches behind current and ~75 patches too few to be supported.
(It works now. This is not a bug report. You should file one if this GNUstep interests you, unless it's really an upstream problem.)
Agree re ubuntu not being the last word on things. OP wants a cross-platform dev environment though. If a platform that is primarily for free unix is obviously broken on a major linux distro, it's a bad omen for its multiplatform prospects.
Yeah, or it's a bug that needs to be filed with the relevant authority.
There are honestly a lot of major linux distros now.
If your cross-platform environment's users are all Gentoo, Fedora, NixOS, Exherbo, Arch Linux, your own homebrew distro, and some OSes with another kernel(s), you may have really achieved cross-platform support without finding Ubuntu support.
My favorite cross-platform project supports Ubuntu, but is lacking Fedora support. It was a major stumbling block for me (just one day), but the dependencies are nothing special, you can compile libuv and libgmp, ncurses, openssl, and libsigsegv pretty much anywhere that I care about (Mac, Linux, BSD).
The only time it mattered for me is when I've got half an hour to give a presentation and the audience is supposed to compile and install the stuff I'm using, but unexpectedly found to be using Fedora and I don't know what packages to tell them to get.
For less popular stuff, even the most current release (trusty) is not likely to be kept up-to-date unless one of the core developers is an Ubuntu user. It's not as bad as Debian (used to be?) and I can't come up with an example off the top of my head of something that I needed that was too old and still is, but the most recent memory was Vim, trying to install YouCompleteMe, they had already come out with Vim 7.4 and the most current release of Ubuntu only had 7.3, with about 600 patches behind current and ~75 patches too few to be supported.
(It works now. This is not a bug report. You should file one if this GNUstep interests you, unless it's really an upstream problem.)