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.
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.
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]
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!
Came to say this, I remember when I first looked at VLC version and saw Rincewind (I think it was), and was like "this has to be a Discworld reference"
I would love nothing more than for a piece of software to be "finished", like the old days. This is why I don't play mobile games, cause every time I want to kill five minutes while waiting in a line or something, I first have to download a 1GB+ update that will take an hour to download on my shitty prepaid line.
this is why i've been really enjoying games like minecraft and factorio, minecraft updates regularly but the server and instance that i play is still just 1.16.5 so i don't even have to worry about updating it.
Similar thing for factorio, although the updates are generally very infrequent, and large updates are massive feature updates. like the upcoming 2.0 expansion, outside of that i just dont really play games much lol.
I actually like Mint's naming scheme, of alphabetical women's names that end in an a sound. Only one problem: They decided to go with the minor upgrade cycle during Mint 17. The 17th letter is Q. I'm frankly surprised they were even able to think of "Quiana." That's why the rest of the 17s were R names, Rafaela, Rebecca etc. so now they're off by one.
Numbers give the wrong impression that one version follows another. Debian release channels exit alongside each other individually. Giving the release channels names helps to make that distinction. It also makes for an easy layout of packages in APT repositories.
Sid is and always has been Sid. If you were to assign numbers, what number should replace that name? There are perfectly working labels for release channels and there is no reasonable replacement.
Obviously a matter of taste and not trying to insult anyone but I never saw the appeal of the Toy Story movies and, adding the Steve Jobs link to Pixar, this is the ONE thing I never liked about Debian
Other than that I used it for YEARS with no issues whatsoever. Debian is honestly rock solid.
I only gave it up when I built a bleeding edge machine (it was bleeding edge for a whole 2 months maybe? hehehe) and I did not trust myself modding it enough to allow for super fresh drivers and other software.
I am now on Garuda Linux which is pretty awesome but I still miss good, solid, old Debian