It's wonderful that there's Ubuntu for Gnome, Kubuntu for KDE, and Xubuntu for XFCE, and they all do well in supporting their own Desktop Environment, and I won't say it's ridiculous to have them separated the way they are. We do know, however, that all three, including all the 'boxes and FVWM and Enlightenment play very well together in a Debian environment together.
It's also very good that the LiveCD install for Ubuntu is very neat, straightforward, and doesn't offer more options than new users know what to do with.
I've also seen propositions for choosing what packages to install, but I don't think picking out every little package is quite the right idea.
It could be to the benefit for many if there were another 'distribution' put together meant for installs where broadband was readily accessible, one that isn't meant for a streamlined installation of one DE, but instead gave you a simple and descriptive way of choosing DE's, one or many, or even not choosing one at all if someone just wanted pseudoterminals.
Then the user could choose their login manager, if applicable, and be informed the differences between, well, basically GDM and KDM. I don't know of any other login managers that really give users what they need.
The 'roles' of the computer could also be selected since computers have so many different situations.
After the choices have been made, the necessary packages, already up to date, could be downloaded and installed.
This wouldn't interfere with X/K/Ubuntu and give interested users more choices installing Ubuntu without the painful process of sifting through many different applications.
What's even better is this installer could be updated every time the LiveCD is started since it would essentially be expected to. This would make changes in your options independent to the image you download and burn. In fact, you could never need to download another install CD again, the installer would find out every time what it has to do to install the next distribution from files stored on a server.
With this, one LiveCD after several years could ask you what release of XKUbuntu you want, just in case a newer one didn't work so well. The only time it would be necessary to get a new image to do a new installation is whenever they replace SATA and all the other market selected technologies we build drivers on.
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