KDE Programs Naming Convention

[Dotan Cohen]

On 09/01/2008, WANSTALL Malcolm <malcolm.wanstall at cnh.com> wrote:
> I gave my friend, a very educated young lass, a live CD of Kubuntu as
> she was wanting me to downgrade her Vista laptop to XP and I thought it
> was my civic duty to show her another option. I said "Play around with
> it for a day and see if it does what you want" which, after some
> convincing, she did.
>
> When I returned she said she wanted XP because Kubuntu was illogical
> (which of course fried my brain since I find it 100% _more_ intuitive
> than most other OSs) so I pressed her to list the things that caused her
> to say that. They were:
>
> 1/ The font names were all different (Okay, can't help that one but I'm
> sure we could work through relearning that little pest) AND
>
> 2/ Things had stupid names (i.e. Kontact, Konquerer, Kolf etc...)
>
> It got me thinking...that is one of the things that first annoyed me
> about KDE, that it is _cool_ to name your program starting with a "K". I
> realise that it serves a small purpose (identifying KDE vs Gnome
> programs and ducking TM issues) but surely to anyone trying to MOVE to
> Kubuntu, it would look a bit...immature (like putting "z" on the end of
> words to make you 1337). It just feels like and in-joke that needs to
> die if KDE wants to be taken even more seriously.
>
> Does anyone else see this as a bit of a marketing blunder and is there
> _any_ community push to change this? Surely good names like Amarok,
> Rosegarden and Bluefish aren't that hard to come up with...they
> certainly make a better first impression on people new to KDE/Linux.

There really should be a movement towards better names. What the hell
is K3B? And what program should I burn a disk with?

Microsoft has great names: Office for an office suit, Internet
Explorer for an Internet web browser, Media Player for a media player.
Ask someone off the street what Amarok or Firefox do, and you will get
a blank stare.

K3B has to be the worst of the bunch.

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?