Linux is not about choice

There was an excellent thread today on fedora-devel-list about the common misperception that Linux is about choice. While it is true that in Linux you have lots of choice, the point is not to be about it. You have a choice about what kind of car to drive too - does that make car buying all about choice? No. You pick the car that best suits you and has the right mix of features. That is the same attitude that you should apply to the selection of Linux distributions. Once you select a distribution (hopefully Fedora :) ), then you have no choice except for the distributions (which unlike proprietary software, you can have a say in the direction of that software) you should follow the direction of the software. For instance, the selection of the new FireWire (IEEE 1394) stack was what brought this discussion on. A distribution should select one particular technology to go with (and Fedora, being a leading edge distribution, will quite often select the latest incarnation, even if that is known to have bug, and prefer to fix the bugs preferably before release into stable, but definitely paying attention to the bugs that are filed (more on the bugs part in another post).

Well, this post has been sitting around forever in my drafts. In the meantime, Jesse Keating did another, similar, post in Red Hat Magazine that's 20 times better than this one.. I just wanted to reemphasize something that Jesse said in that post:

At the end of the day, Linux is about user choice. And without the users, we have nothing. If you don't like the choices that Fedora has made, you have three choices (geez, we even give you choices of how to deal with the lack of choices in Fedora!) of how to deal with that (listed in order of preference):

1) You get involved in Fedora, and try to convince people why your choice is the right one.
2) You choose another Linux distribution (Ubuntu, openSUSE, Gentoo, etc)
3) You use another operating system entirely (Windows, FreeBSD, whatever).

Obviously, we would prefer the first one, the second one is OK too. The third one is what we'd prefer to avoid :).