I see no reason to tell people what packages they need to install. They, as the users of their respective system, ought to know that better than I do.
I also haven’t had many problems with distributing basic Linux executables that load dynamic libraries. By far the worst thing to deal with is glibc’s versioned symbols, but there are ways around it.
No, I am saying tell them to install SDL2 themselves. I would never ignore the 0.01 percent :).
Your particular example is tricky, because from what I remember, either apt or the Debian repos hate having both 32-bit and 64-bit SDL2 installed at once, so I would make SDL2 an exception.
I switched away from SDL2, though, partly for this reason, and now use either GLFW + OpenGL or just GDI directly.
