Linux is like ice cream -- too many flavors to choose

Remember when you could travel pretty much anywhere in America and there would always be a Howard Johnson's nearby?  (No?  Maybe most of you are too young to remember those days.)  Their tag line was "33 flavors of ice cream". 

Often though, they were all out of everything but chocolate and vanilla.  Then, for awhile, you saw Baskin-Robbins on every street corner.  They offered hundreds of flavors but only about a dozen or so were available at any one time.  Still, it was too many for most people to choose.  Today, there are only a handful of flavors of ice cream which are readily available and yet, most people still choose either chocolate or vanilla. 

Linux is a favorite topic of readers of Education IT (and many other blogs these days) and everyone identifies their favorite bad guy which is keeping Linux from being widely adopted.  (Funny...  Microsoft always seems to make it's way into that conversation.)  Perhaps its much simpler than that.  Perhaps there are just too many choices.  Choice is good but too much choice often leads to customer confusion. 

Don't believe me?  Just go to http://www.linux.org and look at their list of distributions.  There are 218 maintained distributions listed!  Narrowing the list down to just English versions ported to the x86 platform, and considering only mainstream distributions, the number is still 55! 

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Why is it better suited to Education IT than any other?