I mean that’s just lucky and totally depends on your field and what is normal - just as an example, we used the LLNL SUNDIALS package for implicit time integration. On Ubuntu 24.04 the latest version is 6.4.1 where the latest published is v7.5.0. We found their major version releases tended to require changes.

There’s also the difference between being able to run and being able to run optimised. At least 5 years ago, the Ubuntu/Debian builds of FFTW didn’t include the parallelised OpenMP library.

In a past life I did HPC support and I recommend the Spack package manager a lot to people working in this area because you can get optimised builds with whatever compiler tool chain and options you need quite easily that way.