failing like never before

Newcomers to Linux are often baffled by the wealth and diversity of choices offered to them when they begin installing Linux for the very first time.

It begins when they first select a Linux distribution, or what some people call a "flavor" (I personally find "flavor" to be an irritating term). Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, Gentoo, PCLinux... The list of Linux distributions is nearly endless, how is a person to chose whats best for themselves? But choosing a distribution is only the beginning, what about the bootloader? Lilo or GRUB? And as for the filesystems, should I use Ext3 or ReiserFS (or perhaps even JFS or XFS), and how should I partition my hard drives and mount them? Should I use KDE or Gnome, or perhaps one of the less renowned desktop environments, like Enlightenment (version 16 or 17?), Fluxbox, Icewm, or XFCE? BASH, or KSH? AppArmor or SELinux?

So many choices! When I install Windows, all I have to do is stick the CD in and click "next" a few times. No wonder Linux possesses such a minute market share! It appears that the lack of unity within the Linux community is the reason that Linux still remains unpopular; open source programmers spend their time coding slightly different programs to accomplish the same task, each one believing that their way is the best. But wouldn't it be better, more efficient, to eliminate all these unnecessary, redundant projects and consolidate the efforts of the Linux community into generating a single program for each task, thus creating a single, standard Linux distribution? Wouldn't it be better, in short, to make Linux more like Windows or Mac?