As a Linux Journal editor, I'd love to claim that in my college years I realized the oppression stemming from proprietary operating systems. I'd love to confess that Linux was the natural choice amongst a sea of other options. Heck, I'd even like to say back then Linux was my first choice. For me, however, the story played out a bit differently.

“You can have freedom without choice.” That someone could even come up with this one is just amazing to me. The ability to choose is a major part of what freedom—or liberty—is. If you cannot make a choice on a matter, then by definition you do not have freedom in the context of that matter.

Every once in a while I come across the argument being made that OS choice is like car choice. It's usually in a forum involving Linux, where one poster will lead off that there's too much choice and the follow-up will read something like:

When the final bell tolls and Microsoft is forced to confront the Linux tidal wave (instead of playing its current game of misinformation and attrition) there will be one Achilles heel that the Redmond contingent can take advantage of: Choice. Simply remind the average Linux user that they have a choice on any issue, and a frenzy of infighting erupts.

I argue that Linux is about choice. Why then, do applications (or their developers) decide to take away that choice?

"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."

I’ve been posting less and less here, simply because I’ve been very happy with my system as it was. My distribution of choice is Arch, my DE of choice is KDE, and my applications of choice are Pidgin, Chromium, Amarok (yes, it’s back), and Transmission. I don’t need more, and I was happy. However.

"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? ..."

Part two of my rant deals with another situation that is slightly different - "Why then, do applications (or their developers) decide to take away [or keep] that choice?"