Comment 248 for bug 668415

John Lea wrote:
>the cost is because adding configurability exponentially increases the number of permutations that need to be designed, user >tested, implemented, bug fixed, etc..

If I buy a car, I expect that one can open all of its doors. Certainly the manufacturer would have saved money and avoided errors if he simply had designed the car so that only one of the doors could be opened, while the other doors would just be some form of adornment. Still the fact that I bought a car would make me feel cheated if I bought a car with only one functioning door. And indeed, the manufacturer could tell me to buy a different brand of car from a different manufacturer if I want a car with four functioning doors but what would you answer in this case. You would feel cheated because already the sound of the word "car" forms an imagine in your mind. An image of how a car should work and which basic functions it should have.
If you say "desktop operating system" you also have some ideas in mind, how this should work. If somebody says operating system for mobile phones, computers, cars, TVs, etc... then you would still expect the operating system of the desktop to fulfill some functions which you are already used to by many years of using other operating systems. You cannot break dozens of paradigm which the users are used to. And it is a real impudence to tell all those old Ubuntu users to go away and use another, different operating system or switch dozens of the system defaults.
Even Microsoft has legacy functions built into the (default) desktop [which is the only desktop], so that you will always experience a rather smooth evolution of the system during the individual development cycles.