A constant battle exists between the flexibility and choice in the Linux marketplace (hence the hundreds of different Linux distributions) and standardizing on a suite of tools, libraries and components that make the deployment of a Linux application and management techniques that much easier.

If you look around for pre-packaged (that is, pre-compiled) software from companies either that don't want to release through open source (Oracle, IBM and others), or who want to distribute an easy to use version of their software, and you'll find that they will often list a variety of different versions for each of the main Linux distributions (Suse, RedHat etc.). Have a non-standard distribution and you can have issues. The reason for these different versions is because seemingly inconsequential differences between Linux distributions (such as different library versions, or missing libraries) can make the difference between an application working and failing.