The codenames for every major Debian release are named after characters from Pixar's Toy Story franchise. Debian's unstable release is fittingly named after Sid, an unstable character from the Toy Story movies.
I love the Linux world's tradition of less serious names, in general.
I guess when the OS is free, you don't need to get the marketing people involved as much.
The kernel was almost named Freax. Then there's GNU, Slackware, KDE which was originally the Kool Desktop Environment, The GIMP (released 1 year after Pulp Fiction), ...
It's often due to the devs creating it as a hobby project and giving it a light-hearted name to show it's nothing professional or important - and then it becomes important later.
My favorite right now is RebeccaBlackOS, which is the only current distro built around Wayland's reference compositor Weston, showcasing all the capabilities Wayland has.
Unlike Hannah Montana Linux, it has no Rebecca Black theming at all. It's just called that because the dev is a fan of hers.
It made me wince when Android did away with its dessert based codenames and now they're just 'Android 12' etc. It really went corporate after that direction.
And please tell me RebeccaBlackOS shows a cool popup or console message every Friday.
i like the names they're cute, i just wish they would attach vesion numbers to the names in official docs because it is a specific hell trying to figure out what release is what version without having a master look up table to consult.
I find it kinda sad that KDE is attempting to stop it's series of K-puns. I suspect that some app names are/were intentionally bad. Like Kcalc instead of Kalculator? Kome on...
Their app names were one of the main reasons I disliked KDE for a long time.
It's just objectively impractible when half the software installed on your pc starts with the same letter.
But Gnome and Xfce aren't any better in that regard.
I never understood this argument. Why does having common first letter bad? If you mean subjectively then sure, it may not be for everyone, but objectively?
Yes, they're called .desktop files and they're found in /usr/share/applications.
On my Linux Mint machine, if I open the Applications menu and go to the Accessories tab, there's an icon that says "Text Editor." There is no binary on the machine by that name; it launches Xed.
When the common name of a package, the actual filename of the executable binary, and the icon title in the App menu are all different, it's not great.
No, your Desktop Environment doesn't have a huge list of package names to app names. It has a list for all your installed packages, but the list entries are part of the packages.
If your system doesn't have gnome-system-monitor installed, you won't have the corresponding .desktop file, because it's part of the package. It would be incredibly wasteful and unnecessarily complex for your system to get shipped out with .desktop files for all possible applications.
Sure. But we don't just exist in the context of the machine currently in front of us. Beginners might, Wade might, but consider this:
I use Linux Mint right now. An "everything but the kitchen sink" kind of distro, GTK3 based, ships with a combination of Gnome's utility apps and several of Mint's Xapps. In the App menu, there's an icon that says "Text Editor." It launches a program that resembles Notepad but a little better. If I switched to KDE but didn't like KATE and wanted Mint's Text Editor, what would I type after sudo apt install to get it? How do you learn that it's Xed? It doesn't call itself Xed anywhere in the GUI.
What do you think Seahorse does? Either you already know this, or you have to look it up, you'll never guess what it does from the title. I'll give you no hint whatsoever: It's Gnome's equivalent of Kleopatra.
spoiler
Those are both credential managers for things like PGP or SSH keys, things like that. Why KDE didn't call theirs "Keyring" I'll never understand.
There's so many bad ways to name software, and the Linux ecosystem has tried them all. WINE Is Not Emulation or LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder. I still believe GNU would have a kernel if Stallman had put the effort coming up with HURD/HIRD into writing the actual software. If you had to guess, what does Caja do? We live in a world where Nautilus and Nemo are two versions of the same thing.
The various text editors, ranked from best name to worst name: Gedit, Xed, Leafpad, Mousepad, Pluma, KATE. Gedit, it's from Gnome because of the G, and it's an editor. Xed contains the same information but you have to have more in-depth prior knowledge, you have to know Mint and their Xapp initiative. Leafpad is better than Mousepad because the latter might be a mouse/cursor configuration utility. Pluma...plume > feather > quill pen > writing > text editor. Wow what a journey. Why would I independently come to the conclusion that KATE stands for KDE Advanced Text Editor? Call it Ktext.
I would rather them call it Gedit than gnome-text-editor because they're willing to put "Gedit" on the title bar of the window, they won't put "Gnome Text Editor" up there.
Which stands for 'GNU is not Unix'. Also 'less' (which is more). Pine is(was) Program for Internet News and Email and the FOSS fork is 'Alpine' or 'Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email'. And there's a ton more of wordplays and other more or less fun stuff on how/why things are named like they are.
And pico is short from 'Pine Composer'. Nano was originally called 'tip' (This Is not Pico), but that name was already used by another program. And 'elm' besides being a tree is a short from 'Electronic Mail'.
The name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems.[6] CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun through the X/Open consortium, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment.[7] The K was originally suggested to stand for "Kool", but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Therefore, the KDE initialism expanded to "K Desktop Environment" before it was dropped altogether in favor of simply KDE in a rebranding effort in 2009.[8]
So cool! Thank you for your reply! Do you know him personally? (nevermind, I missed the TIL) I have so much good things to say about this project from my noob perspective. I wish I could contribute some day!
Which came later, Windows XP, ME, or Vista? Sure, you probably have that memorized, but if you didn't it wouldn't be immediately obvious. That's just a problem with using codenames instead of numbers, nothing to do with unserious names. At least Debian releases have reasonable version numbers alongside the codenames, unlike some other operating systems!