Chris DeBona argues that the incompatibilities between Linux distributions don’t matter because the majority of people use RedHat or SUSE so that’s all people bother supporting. Of particular note is the quote:

In the windows world, people don’t feel the need to support every version of windows, either. In the Java world we do try to support everything. We want everything to be compatible, we raise the bar so that code should run everywhere. Sure it doesn’t always work out but that’s the aim and it’s simply not good enough to lower the standards for compatibility to what the linux distributions have – it’s not even good enough to lower standards for compatibility to what Windows offers. So Chris, you obviously need to spend a lot more time in the Java community rather than the Linux community to grasp this argument.