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Honestly I dislike a lot of the KDE default app names. Default apps should have simple, descriptive names.
The fact that the file explorer is called “Dolphin” instead of just “File Explorer” or “Files” or something descriptive just makes KDE harder to use for no good reason.
I wish I could just easily reconfigure the name and icon of the default apps so it’s fixable at least.
For me it’s the opposite, generic names make searching for issues on the web stupidly difficult.
No one has problems figuring out that Dolphin is the file explorer, and if you search for “file” in the KDE menu, it returns Dolphin as a result.
I find it hard to believe “File Manager KDE” would be unsearchable for, given that it already returns results related to Dolphin. I just don’t believe this is difficult at all, sorry.
I shouldn’t have to figure out the file manager is called Dolphin, the name should be descriptive by itself. The fact that you have to rely on the keyword search to figure it out is imo just bad naming.
well if just watched Johnny Pneumonic, you’d know that a dolphin is the best animal for navigating files.
(seriously, watch it).
“explorer” is the name for the windows file MANAGER… but still, whatever name they choose could reflect the thing it does a little better.
while we’re on it, the name “Lemmy” is terrible for this app. Sure, the musician is cool… but has nothing to do with it, and i think a big thing holding it back. (as far as social animals go, Lemmings have a terrible fake legend about running off cliffs together… they don’t do that, but it’s what most people think about).e.g. Mastodon has been around for years, is actually really federated, not owned by a corporation, and a lot more features than BlueSky… but bluesky already has more users and i think largely because: marketing… how are people going to talk about “Mastodon” when they’ve probably never even heard the word before? (also named after a cool band, but not suitable for the masses).
GIMP is an awful name…
these things usually start as one person’s pet project, and they name it what they want… which is fine but once it starts to gain traction, they should rebrand it.Lol Johnny Pneumonic
i will keep this autocorrect
I think you better fix it, what if ChairmanMeow searches for Johnny Pneumonic?
e.g. Mastodon has been around for years, is actually really federated, not owned by a corporation, and a lot more features than BlueSky… but bluesky already has more users and i think largely because: marketing… how are people going to talk about “Mastodon” when they’ve probably never even heard the word before? (also named after a cool band, but not suitable for the masses).
Also fewer syllables, which apparently has a noticeable impact.
As a normal user…what’s next, “File Manager and Browser coupled with basic Statistic Display by KDE”?
Call it Dolphin and it’s good. If I search “file manager for kde” it will show dolphin. Once I seen it, I know it and it’s hella more memorable than any descriptive word soup you’d have.
The entire point is that I shouldn’t have to memorize what such a basic feature of the distro is called.
We could get best of both worlds and put K before the names.
kfiles kbrowser, kedit, if kde ever made a c compiler for some reason we could name it kcc.
I never understood the GNOME logic rename Totem, Nautilus, Epiphany, etc… Granted, I don’t understand much about GNOME.
What do you think Gnome Seahorse does? What utility function does that small piece of software perform, based on its name? I’ll give you a hint: It directly competes with KDE’s Kleopatra. Did you guess GPG and other encryption key generator/manager? Because that’s what those are for. Not sure how KDE kissed “Keyring.”
I’m not sure if it’s Gnome that started it, but file managers often have a nautical theme. Gnome Nautilus, Cinnamon Nemo, KDE Dolphin…
They never show the names anyways. They just call it “Files”, “Web”… Generic terms that get tons of unrelated search results. They don’t even call it “GNOME Files”, “GNOME Web”, it’s like they want to be the only program on your computer that does that, like they own the concept.
Basically what he said
Epiphany doesn’t automatically tell you what it is
Gnome Web does
Gnome is big in the accessibility community and stuff like this helps
I found more value in knowing which web browser is used because I’ve used my computer more than 5 minutes and know the difference between Firefox and Epiphany. Same with Totem over VLC, etc.
I imagine you aren’t part of the target “accessibility” audience
Because it barely exists
They should just rename Gnome to Desktop Environment and rewrite it in
RustProgramming LanguageThe name “Programming language” is already taken by HTML though
I do now want an “ADE” written in APL
I don’t remember where, but you can configure the app launcher to show the descriptive name instead of the app name by default.
True, but this then applies to all apps. And for some bizarre reason if GenericName is not available the fallback is Comment, so tons of apps turn into a long string of text that gets cut off.
Like, look at this:
Top row is perfect, but then you get to Steam…
In the launcher’s own settings
They are searchable by descriptive names, they shouldn’t have ‘simple, descriptive names’.
I wish I could just easily reconfigure the name and icon of the default apps so it’s fixable at least.
you can have overrides for .desktop files, and the name is stored there
Keyword “easily”. Having to figure out the scheme for those files and where to exactly put them is not user-friendly. And from searching online, there’s vague edgecases that cause it to not get recognized by the task bar properly.
But it is neat trick for those who tinker a bit more I suppose.
ok, got it. this applies to KDE Plasma.
right click on a program’s icon in the start menu, like kate.
click “edit application”.
switch to the “application” tab.
change what’s in the “name” field.
click “ok”.I think this should be doing the same thing
This only works if your distro is set up in a way that allows it. SteamOS doesn’t seem to allow it for example, see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1744
that seems like a plasma bug made visible by a distro quirk
It probably is, yes. But somehow I feel like I run into all of those bugs :(.
yeah I often feel similarly. like, the KDE Akonadi calendar-contacts-whatnot system is so so buggy
That seems related to it being immutable and is probably something Valve will fix as Bazzite does not have this issue.
I mean it won’t work if you rip out your hard drive either, but usually things are custom managed in those situations by whoever created them.
(Ex. Nixos is the same, but not really a problem cause you expect to manage it within nix)
KDE Menu Editor makes that easier (pretty sure that’s the one for .desktop files)
I always confuse it with dolphin emulator in my package managers.
It doesn’t even have a k in the name!!
Yay!
is this the drop down terminal thingy?
Yes, I think it’s called Yukkake
yakuake, for “yet another kuake”, from “kuake”, which is a kde-ification of “quake”. because the console in quake dropped down like that.
Damn, I posted the Quake screenshot just because it makes me think of that. And TIL it actually comes from there.
Programmers think like other programmers I guess.
That makes a lot more sense now. Love me a project with a fun story behind it
I really need these lore dumps for linux stuff because I will be highly confused at the names. Still can’t get over when I learned that GIMP is not just a perverted or derogatory name, but GNU Image Manipulation Program (and I had to look up what GNU meant too… which was named after a song about a gnu, aka wildebeest)
i do love the personality of FOSS naming, but please give me a short tidbit about the etymology in the about page, or else I’ll be forced to do an hour long Wikipedia deep dive because I simply can’t help myself!
Here is just the history of vim off the top of my head.
Ken Thompson wrote ed the editor (pronounced by spelling each letter) and still is the standard text editor in unix. He also worked majorly on original Unix and C.
You could only see the line you are typing and had to rewrite whole line to change one letter.
Then Bill Joy wrote ex as an improvement to ed. But wanted to keep improving. As he improved ex it got a visual editor and became vi. (read by spelling each letter) Bill Joy later led BSD Unix.
Ken Thompson improved vi to make stevie. (for atari ST) There were further improvements and ports like Amiga.
Stevie wasn’t as close to original vi as Steve Kirkendall wanted so he wrote elvis as an alternative improvement.
AT&T still owned UNIX at the time and famously sued BSD Unix. They had to replace all Unix tools to not get in trouble.
So even tho Bill Joy who is leading BSD wrote original vi, they had to find an alternative. At first they were gonna use elvis but Keith Bostic wanted a bug-to-bug compatible version and wrote nvi.
Then in 1991 Bram Moolinar wrote “vi improved” or “vim” for short by basing source code on Amiga’s stevie port to raise awareness about Uganda.
He was also a “benevolent dictator for life” which is a term used for opensource devs that always have the final say in the project. Opensource leaders must be benevolent as disagreements result in forks.
So far these were mostly few years apart but much later in 2014 vim rejected multithreading and we got the fork neovim which doesn’t have a wikipedia page and where my original research stopped.
Fun fact at the end. The nvi editor was forked in dragonfly BSD with name nvi2 and bsd systems still have nvi.
There’s a similar one named guake.
They knew what they were doing.
