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.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    108·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
      35·
      4 months ago

      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…

      • superkret@feddit.org
        261·
        4 months ago

        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.

        • Strykker@programming.dev
          26·
          4 months ago

          Gotta say though it’s kinda nice when you run an update to be able to tell ah yes KDE apps are being upgraded when you see the wall of Ks

        • bamboo@lemm.ee
          2·
          4 months ago

          Is gnome that bad? They seem to have been moving away from weird names for many years now.

            • bamboo@lemm.ee
              2·
              4 months ago

              In the branding, but the name of the installed applications in the UI do not contain “gnome”.

              • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
                2·
                4 months ago

                It’s not just the branding, it’s the actual command.

                Do you want to launch the hardware monitor? gnome-system-monitor. The terminal? gnome-terminal. And so forth.

                Your DE They will give these clearer and easier names to search from the menu, as well as more recognisable icons, but that’s not on Gnome

                Still makes the command slightly more of a PITA

                • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  4 months ago

                  Do you think DEs just have a huge list of package names to app names, or how do you imagine this would work?

                  In reality, it’s of course fully on Gnome, as it’s part of their code. Nobody except for Gnome has anything to do with the name that’s being shown.

                  • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
                    1·
                    4 months ago

                    I did think it worked like that but the package maintainers setting these does make more sense. Thanks for letting me know!

                    I also edited my comment to reflect this

                  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                    11·
                    4 months ago

                    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.

        • bitfucker@programming.dev
          2·
          4 months ago

          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?

          • Hule@lemmy.world
            7·
            4 months ago

            Because if you want to start them by typing their names, autocomplete kicks in later.

            • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
              4·
              4 months ago

              There’s a solution for that tho: Tags. If you have sane (default) tags, you type ‘terminal’ and konsole pops up. And I feel like KDE mostly has that.

            • saigot@lemmy.ca
              1·
              4 months ago

              I think it can be helpful to separate “built in” gui tools with everything else, having them all under one letter accomplishes that.

    • somenonewho@feddit.org
      251·
      4 months ago

      The kernel was almost named freax

      Did you know that kernel releases have codenames?

      My favourite being 4.0: “Hurr durr I’ma sheep” because I remember taking part in that poll.

    • curry@programming.dev
      23·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • dev_null@lemmy.ml
        25·
        4 months ago

        They didn’t:

        • Android 12: Snow Cone
        • Android 13: Tiramisu
        • Android 14: Upside Down Cake
        • Android 15: Vanilla Ice Cream

        They stopped using the codenames in marketing, but they are still there.

        • curry@programming.dev
          6·
          4 months ago

          Happy to be corrected. But I still wish they were used prominently as it used to be before.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      19·
      4 months ago

      GNU

      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.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      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.

    • bilouba@jlai.lu
      5·
      4 months ago

      Isn’t KDE “Kommon Desktop Environment” in reference to CDE “Common Desktop Environment” ?

      • superkret@feddit.org
        13·
        4 months ago

        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]

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE

        (TIL the creator of KDE studied at the same university as me!)

        • bilouba@jlai.lu
          2·
          4 months ago

          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!

    • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org
      4·
      4 months ago

      I love the Linux world’s tradition of less serious names, in general.

      Kinda like the Minds in Iain Banks’s Culture universe.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      86·
      4 months ago

      I love the Linux world’s tradition of less serious names, in general.

      I hate it. Which came out later, “stretch”, “Woody”, “Jessie”? It’s so annoying to have to look that up.

      • pmc@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        28·
        4 months ago

        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!