We have root on our own (personal) boxes, so we can essentially do what we want (within reason). There's a tremendous value in having a somewhat homogenous env

We have root on our own (personal) boxes, so we can essentially do what we want (within reason). There's a tremendous value in having a somewhat homogenous environment. We have our own package repo and .deb packages to access internal resources. Even little stuff like editor plugins customized to our internal stuff we have packages for. Plus, we hire a great deal of folks that aren't Linux experts. Have a sane set of defaults gets people going faster. It makes a lot of sense to have our own distro when we're talking this kind of scale.