Every once in a while, I type something like “Linux vs Windows” into google, in a foolish attempt to assess the general landscape (and often find outdated articles)
This time, I came across this article. The author argues that the choice provided by open source software results in a usability nightmare for people who don’t care for the choice.
The one paragraph that really rang true:

The tradeoffs made by the open source community between usability vs. choice will become increasingly important as various distributions and organizations (such as SuSe and Lindows) try to move Linux into the general desktop market space. It’s extremely important for the open source community to be responsive not only to users’ freedom to choose, but also to users’ freedom not to have to choose.

With bazillions of distros, and bazillions of alternative programs that all try do the same thing, a Linux user has to spend a lot of time finding the right combination of tools to build exactly the experience he or she wants. And it’s true that no average user is going to do this. It just doesn’t matter.
Distro’s like Ubuntu will come along and try to collect all the best-of-breed selections. But even users of Ubuntu know, not everything is quite up to snuff. Best-of-breed doesn’t really mean anything if the the user still can’t do what they need to (connect to an exchange server, for example).
Choice is good when it lets you choose a better solution over one that already works. Choice sucks when you have to choose between a bunch of halfway solutoins that all don’t work in some way, and you wonder why all these people don’t cooperate together to at least make a baseline that works.