Back to the IBM example, I recently had to help install their "distro" (rely just a wrapper of redhat). I had to downgrade from 64bit to 32 bit. rather dissapoining. next the package system was half-broken. It looked as if IBM had not maintained there system after an update of yum or something (there were no package catagorys until after adding a secondary repository). after these small disapointments, I had to reconfigure the Xorg server myself to deal with the graphics card and two moniters. I can't rely fault them with that though. all in all, it was better than there version of windows (slow does not catch all of it) but worse than most systems that I have had to deal with (excluding windows systems).

so, yes it seems that the avalability of third party software and the "cryptic" way of installing things has them confused.