You're right, freedom of choice is a big central benefit of Linux. Perhaps, ultimately because everything is modular due to the disconnected-distributed nature

You're right, freedom of choice is a big central benefit of Linux. Perhaps, ultimately because everything is modular due to the disconnected-distributed nature of development. But, giving general users Xmonad and a terminal isn't going to encourage more people to use Linux. Consequently, you land-up building applications that general users want and trying to make the environment more accessible to them. Ah, but you might say that "more users" isn't an important goal for you [1]. But, the challenge is that below a certain level of users the hardware and software ecosystem isn't incentivised to make things "work with" Linux. If you have 5% of the PC user-base then Intel cares that WIFI chips work, Barclays cares that you can login to their web bank, etc [2]. So even if you don't want Linux to be 50%, you probably do want it to be an important platform. I don't really buy into the idea that Linux can't be both mainstream and for expert users. The "general users" easy environments and the expert-user xmonad user environments can both co-exist. First, because the Linux distributions are an easy way for users to self-segment - particular types of users are attracted to different distributions. The slight downside of this being that we get tribal wars over distros'. And, really the differentiation between distros is mostly their default choices - you can run Xmonad on Ubuntu (I run i3 for example) and I'm sure you can run KDE on Arch. It's pretty much the same software underneath. [1] And actually one of the things I dislike is when people say "the Community wants X" which is totally bogus because a lot of people have different goals, there is no "one" community. [2] You might recall the 90's/early 00's where there was lots of Web tech that made sites not work where Linux was the browser such as e.g. ActiveX.