Installers like Ubuntu's tend to lead in the direction of one big partition, but no, that's not a "Linux thing". Windows 95 may have killed the old MS-DOS "join" command, but in the *nix world, it is normal to spread portions of the filesystem across multiple partitions, drives, and network volumes.

For instance, I tend to break at least /boot, /var, /var/tmp, /tmp, /usr, /usr/local, /opt, /home, and swap away from root. For each I can select a filesystem type appropriate to the data it will hold, and I don't need to worry that, say, a log file suddenly growing massively large will take down my machine. Using a logical volume manager makes it easy to expand a given filesystem when more space is needed, and drives may be added as needed.