Open source

Having been an administrator, my job was to keep software updated and running. At the time the OS we used was just upgraded and many applications no longer worked. Of course you were on the phone with the vendor.

The answer we got most was we have to wait an see what the OS vendor was going to do. That is not the answer students want to here when not being able use the software to get their classes done. One particular vendor had software I could fix if they would let me modify it. The application vendor threatened to sue my employer an me if any changes were made. Between a rock and a hard place. All was eventually worked out but quite a few students wanted to strangle the IT team. That really happens with proprietary software.

With open source software in most cases it is not a problem. You can modify the source code to solve issues quickly and effectively. Most of all the major distros have source code repositories for just that.

Also to consider:

A shame that people fall back into the proprietary software rut thinking one linux distro is better than another distro because you have to take it as it is. If you want what another distro to have the same packages use some of the conversion tools to allow packages to run on your distro. or get the source code and recompile it for your distro. No one distro is better than another.
To take it one step further, you can use source code like pseudo-code. For example I took and old dbase script and converted it to a bash shell script. We do a lot of that with other languages also. The only limitation is your imagination.