I don't think Linux is about anything (and that includes intangibles like "choice" or "freedom"). It's an open source kernel that a bunch of people hack on, tha

I don't think Linux is about anything (and that includes intangibles like "choice" or "freedom"). It's an open source kernel that a bunch of people hack on, that's it. The traditional Linux distro model is about choice, but that was from necessity, not design. Android and Ubuntu and others have shown that there's a whole spectrum of OS's with varying degrees of specific design and policy that you can build on top of the Linux kernel and specific pieces of the traditional Linux userland stack. I don't think any one of these things is the right way to do a Linux-based system, I just see all of that software as the primordial ooze that various OS's arise out of. There was a local minimum in the late '90s and early 2000s in which most of the distros were trying to do the same thing in different ways and remain more or less compatible with each other, but these days there's a lot more willingness to actually try to design complete systems, which include things like UI policies and standard libraries that limit their compatibility with other systems. I think this is great- the traditional distro model is still going strong via Debian and Slackware and so on, but I'm glad that people are thinking about Linux in new and more specific ways as well. (EDIT: typo)