[dima55]

Lots. Because many upstream projects don't have their build system set up to work within a distribution (to get dependencies form the system and to install to standard places). All distros must patch things to get them to work.

[latchup]

Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.

[dima55]

Huh? I contribute to Debian; I don't aggressively patch anything. You can too.

[lelanthran]

> nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages

I didn't know about this. Link?