> Poeple in the Free software/open source community live by the mantra of "choice is good". But to me, that's only true to an extent. I don't want an OS asking me to make decisions on things that no other OS has ever asked me about before--for instance, how do I know off the top of my head whether I want to install package X or not if I can't even figure out what package X *does*?

See, I think that choice *is* good, but it mandates choosing how much choice to have, if you catch my meaning. Requiring you to confirm every package one at a time isn't providing you with choice - it's providing you with a pain in the neck. What Slack (and most modern distros) does is giv you a choice of how you want to control the install process. You can set it to dump the whole affair onto your drive - every package - without confirmation. Or you can get a tree view of everything organised as individual packages within groups (pretty much what you were talking about, I think). And there are a billion other options, including, for the silly folk, the aforementioned "confirm every single package one-by-one." To my thinking, that's what having a choice is all about. Being able to control every aspect of the install down to the fine details, but not having to if you don't want to.