It's still not great, but it's no longer nearly as severe a problem as it was. My advice is to use a distro that supports apt, (eg Debian, RH, SuSE).

Standard libraries may seem like a good solution, but they would reduce some of the aspects that make Linux great. Anyway, good luck trying to co-ordinate all the different distros to use a standard set of libraries. Solutions are being developed. Have you heard of Autopackage?

Anyway I don't see this as such a big barrier, most desktop users never install software. And when they do it's a big fancy well known package that will probably come with a noarch rpm (Flash(tm) anyone?)