One of the harder things in life is to be able to criticize what you love. But everybody is to do that at some point in their lives, so I figured out it'd be sooner or later that I'd get do do it. So here I am doing this critique of one aspect that still sucks big time in most of the Linux distributions today: names.
I believe most of you are grown up enough to know that you can't judge a book by its cover, the contents are what matter, eye candy will not increase productivity blablabla... but c'mon. The name of whatever thing you can think of is the first impression of the thing itself. It strikes you in the face. It is the basic reason why you don't name a kid "Harry Dick."
Let's take, for example, the by far most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu. How many people know how to pronounce this name? And worse: how many of its users can pronounce this name correctly? Ubuntu, you liking or not, essentially IS the face of Linux in the globe, and yet it's not even capable of introducing itself? A vaccuum cleaner sucks less than this.
The list can go on, and you know it. Probably most of the linux users that read this intro were so blinded by the fact that they "haev 2 pwnz da muth4fuck1n M$" that they could not notice such elementary deficiency. "Gentoo?" 'Thfuggisdat? How the hell are you supposed to pronouce it, Gen or Jen? MEPIS? "Me piss?!" This is getting offensive... "Slackware?" Are we really supposed to take this seriously?
I think I made my point clear. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great and better than the commercial OSs for almost everything. But everyone can agree that when it comes to picking names, Linux developers should leave it to the other guys. Everyone knows what a "window" is. My house has a dozen. "Apple" is a well-known fruit, red or green. "Mac" is a simple and catchy word, and I'm sure that many people heard of McDonald's. So why not adapt this "KISS-style" convention of naming? Maybe we can start by changing the kernel name, I'm tired of hearing people say that "LIE-nucks" is only for nerds. GET IT RIGHT, motherfucker.
So I guess that the least I can do it try to finish this off in a good mood. And I'll do so by slightly rebutting my argument and point out a couple of the names that don't actually suck:
-Debian: Deb + Ian! You cannot be any more manly than a guy that names an operating system after his girlfriend.
-Arch Linux: Kaboom, windows! Fear your arch-enemy!
-Linux Mint: adds a taste to computing. Also, all their releases are named after girls. Real man shit.
-KNOPPIX: catchy, and also named after a real name - Knopper.
-Puppy Linux: adds a touch of "cute" to it. The distribuition is also very loyal to its name.
Hope that sheds light into your weeks!
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