Glad to hear it worked.

3rd party - Not sure what you mean by that. Many packages used in "Linux" distros have their own communities (check out sourceforge to see a plethora of thse). So for example even though Perl typically is installed in most distros it isn't really a "Linux" thing. I began using Perl years ago on HP-UX (Hewlett Packards UNIX). It is an "open source" thing however. Technically "Linux" is only the base kernel. However on most distros the kernel you're using has the work of other communities loaded in as modules.

There are even competing communities. I mentioned vixie-cron because it is the one that came in when I selected to install cron (along with anacron which I let it install though I don't use it). There may be other cron packages that would provide crond but this is the one that Fedora/Redhat community chose. For others you'd have to go search them out (e.g. go to rmpseek site) and might even have to compile them. Of course a lot of admins will tell you to always compile your own for everythng. I know for example there are competing DHCP client software packages. Debian uses dhclient but from a thread I was once in I know there are at least two others.

Being a UNIX admin since 1991 I always try to get the things that seem most like the way I've done it in the UNIX variants I've used assuming there isn't a default preference for the distro being used.

what i mean is theres regular PERL, and then there might be PERL-supermod (which is perl with some kind of twist to it that makes it better for some reason or better for different applications)

That all deals with communities of which I spoke. Perl itself has many available modules that can be loaded with CPAN.

So I guess in all that context the answer to your question would be it wasn't 3rd party for the distro you chose but the primary one chosen by that distro's community.