routine maintenace scripts?

Sorry if this seems stupid, but for my personal use, I run OS X, which contains a BSD subsystem. Part of that subsystem are 3 maintenance scripts (daily, weekly, monthly) that keep the BSD system running in top shape. In fact if those scripts do not run, the performance of the system suffers drastically (becomes very noticeable after about 1-2 months).

Now i thought maybe they were an Apple thing, but looking in the cron scripts, they are clearly made by Berkeley in 1994, so I guess they are part of all BSD systems and/or subsystems.

Which brings me to my question. Our server is RedHat Linux, and I do not see routine maintenance scripts anywhere that are being run. Is BSD so different from Linux that it requires routine daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts or else the system suffers pretty badly? Is routine maintenance on Linux not necessary or is the maintenance facilitated some other way then with cron scripts?