That’s my whole point, you don’t need a whole distro to compile things. You can always compile things, that’s how distros get their packaged stuff in the first place. Compiling is the great equalizer. It compiles with whatever libraries your system already has. It doesn’t care what distro you have or what versions of things you’re using, as long as they work. And they usually do. Unless there’s some fundamental and likely recent incompatibility that hasn’t been upstreamed yet, which is rare.

Syncthing is written in go, which has its own library and compiling ecosystem and is relatively standardized and straightforward to compile. They walk you through the process here it should work on essentially every platform, even (and often especially) the weird non-standard ones that no other packaging format supports.