I think questions of the form "What are the criteria for judging/determining which X to use" are quality questions, and the answers tend to have lasting utility.
However, I'm not too sure of their topicality here. This site has been created primarily to address glaring gaps in the topicality of every other site; however, questions of this particular format are explicitly on-topic on the other technology-oriented sites (SU, SF, SO, AD, WA, etc.) almost without exception.
It's hard to turn away a quality question -- it really is -- but I think that making this site have a rather specific and well-defined scope, rather than "anything goes", will increase its chances of graduating from private beta.
To that end, I would suggest that questions of this form which are asked on this site, once it goes public, should be migrated to the appropriate technology site. In the case of "What are the criteria for determining which GNU/Linux distribution I should use?", that would be a good, and topical, question for U&L or SU, but I would consider it to be off-topic for sw-recs.
During the private beta, questions of this format should be voted to close as off-topic, along with a helpful comment and/or a link to this question.
