I'm a systems developer, not a distro maintainer. When I boot off of that iso, I want a menu that asks me this: [ ] Desktop [ ] Server [ ] Embedded [ ] Cust

I'm a systems developer, not a distro maintainer. When I boot off of that iso, I want a menu that asks me this: [ ] Desktop [ ] Server [ ] Embedded [ ] Custom This ultimately comes down to a user interface issue, but it's different than the kind of user interface often associated with the HN crowd. It's more like an API user interface, be that a web or programming library API. A crucial feature of good APIs is 'graceful degradation' in terms of easiness/control. Take a look at the libcURL library[1]. cURL has 3 levels of access: "easy," "share," and "multi." If you don't care about a lot of features and just want to download a webpage, the easy interface will get you what you want in a few lines of code. If you have something more complicated, you can go all the way down to the multi interface to access many of the raw functions of the API. They key takeaway is giving the user control of her complexity level. If I'm a sysadmin compiling an image meant to be deployed on thousands of servers, then something like Arch would be pretty great -- I can fine-tune things how I want. If I'm just a random developer, then I would like to stick to 'sane defaults,' with the option to revisit those defaults later if needed. I really don't care what cron I have, don't force me to pick one against my will. [1] http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/ http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/