KDE Programs Naming Convention

[Derek Broughton]

WANSTALL Malcolm wrote:

> 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.

That has always been a complaint of mine against anything *nix-ish.  There
are far too many juvenile in-jokes (I filed a bug report against a KDE
app - fortunately now forgotten - that shipped with a truly inane help
file, with the note that it would have been far better received by users if
it had no documentation at all than with the childish file attached.  I was
simply told that it wouldn't be fixed unless I rewrote the help file
myself).

But really, why bother trying to push the product on anyone who's only
complaints about the programs are their names!  The reaction is as juvenile
as what she's complaining about. (Though even that's fixable - if you
change the menu to show only Descriptions, not Names, she wouldn't have
even noticed.)

> 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.

I disagree.  Unless distros start separating their repositories into kde &
gnome, it's much more convenient for us to be able to tell at a glance
which desktop they're for.
-- 
derek