Although I have some doubts that XFCE is "so very much lighter" than GNOME (GNOME 2.20 doesn't take too much memory if you don't start all kind of crap), it is still lighter, and in a few years there will be less and less antiquated computers who require extra-light window managers (Fluxbox, Openbox, Blackbox, WindowMaker, IceWM).

"When I wrote a passioned statement about how having a choice of distros was a good thing, I decided to list 359 other things that it was good to have choices for. I thought it was a good effort, and still do. But in the course of a week I have also come to realize that other points of view may have some validity, too."

There are lots and lots of Linux distros out there. In fact, if there is one thing that frustrates potential Linux users, then it is the abundance of choice. However, being a an end user myself, I sometimes wonder if the abundance of choice is really a strength or weakness.

In the 10 years I've been using Linux, I've run the gamut of window managers and desktop environments: FvWM, FvWM95, ICEWM, AfterStep, BlackBox, KDE, GNOME, Beryl, Fluxbox, CDE, XFCE, Windowmaker, Sawfish, Metacity, WM2, as well as Compiz. But it seems that no matter how many times I try another Linux GUI, I always go back to Enlightenment.

Linux doesn't offer too much choice, "but it may not organize its choices well enough," says Slashdot blogger David Masover. The ideal situation "is to provide sane defaults so that people aren't forced to make choices --

"Look through a list available packages for any free OS and you’ll find a sometimes bewildering choice of browsers, mail readers, editors, desktops and tetris-clones available. Despite this many will just blindly install the first one they’ve heard of. Is this a good policy? What good is all this choice if we don’t use it and what are those choices? ..."

"So we all know that users who are new to the command-line find it intimidating, no matter what operating system, they just find it intimidating. These users are the kind of people who never used early Unix or MS-DOS, they were introduced to computers with graphics and point-and-click interfaces. And I've been wondering: What's so intimidating?"

"...As many know, Gentoo is about choice, and the default choice is to "opt-in". So if you install Gnome on Gentoo, you get a bare-bone Gnome experience, sometimes in stark contrast to what other distros do. So in order to level the playing field, I'll be writing about how to enable some of those cool features. Today's special : gnome-keyring's pam module...."

Linux advocates like to brag about the number of choices people get with open source software. Windows offers very few choices. Linux offers literally hundreds of niches, a distribution for every need. But is that so much of a good thing that it's scaring people away?