KDE Programs Naming Convention

[Billie Walsh]

WANSTALL Malcolm 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.
>
>   
In fact it's not just Kubuntu/KDE. It's pretty much a Linux problem. I
know, I know. The names are usually acronyms [ although for the life of
me I can't think of a great example off the top of my head - senior
moment { this hair is not blond, it's gray } ]. But, they are hard for a
noob to figure out the first time they see some of them. [ how the hell
does a noob see "kooka" and KNOW it's scanning/OCR software - if it
didn't tell you in the menu ] Hell, I still get the giggles when I see
some of the names things get [ I mean where the hell did "airsnort" come
from - airsniff maybe .................... but airsnort?????? ]

It doesn't take long to figure out what things do despite the names. But
I can see where it might put someone off. It's not that the software is
poor, most is at the very least as good as the commercial stuff and
mostly better, it's just that the names could use a bit of help. How are
people supposed to take it serious when a list of program names reads
like a Robin Williams monologue.