29 ms·

Oh God, they should stop using stupid names like KClock.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Yeah, putting "K" in front of every app/product of yours is dumb, unlike that company who puts "i" in front of everything, that's genius. /s
- scrollaway 5y ago
  I'm a KDE long time user and contributor, and i agree with the GP's comment. Apple does it more sparingly (now), and fairly consistently: as a product line evolved. The iMac line did it when it was "cool", the iPod was the next one, and the iPhone evolved from the iPod so it made a lot of sense (and thus so did iOS). There's not really anything else Apple names this way. Apple TV, Macbook, Airpods, Safari... Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous. It's also not a particularly "pretty" letter and you end up with names that are either purposeful misspellings, midKapitalized, are plain bad puns, or occasionally and at best, are merely oKay. KDE does not have a great brand. Apple does.
  - rascul 5y ago
    Currently Apple also has iPad, iCloud, iLife, iTunes, iMessage, iMovie, and iWork. Formerly, Apple had iDVD, iPhoto, iTools, iWeb, and iSight. It might also be interesting to note that Apple licenses iOS from Cisco [0]. [0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_ios_name_to_apple_screenshot_shows_iwork_on_iphone https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_io...
    - eddieroger 5y ago
      They also have MacBook Pro, Mac mini, Mac Pro, AppleTV (+), AirPods (Pro, Max), HomePod, Pencil, Watch, HomeKit, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, Smart Keyboard. Also, Apple no longer has iLife or iTunes, and "iWork" is no longer a bundle, but even if it was, its apps are Pages, Keynote and Numbers. No "i"s there. They use the "i" prefix more sparingly now, as the original post said.
      - abrowne 5y ago
        iBooks is now Books too.
    - lucideer 5y ago
      That sounds exactly like it was used sparingly: Apple have a lot more than 12 products. I've never heard of iLife, iTools, iWeb, iWork or iSight so its use in flagship products is even more sensibly sparing. iTunes has been replaced by Apple Music, and possibly iMovie too??? It's also worth noting Apple has been somewhat mocked got their overuse of i. Despite the sparing use. So KDE tacking it onto everything is even less sensible in this context. I think the K naming has probably hampered adoption of KDE products in the long term: I was always resistant to install K* apps when I was using a non-KDE desktop due to compatibility paranoia, something I tended not to even consider when installing gnome/gtk apps for example (which tend mostly not to be prefixed with g or gtk- or similar)
      - toyg 5y ago
        > That sounds exactly like it was used sparingly [...] iTunes has been replaced [...] , and possibly iMovie too The i-branding was very, very effective. Apple was one of the very few brands that really managed to "own" the internet in the mind of the average consumer. Which is one of the reasons it was wildly successful. The new branding, in comparison, is meh. They now just leverage "Apple". Nothing else, because they think they are too good. Creating new brands is difficult and risky, so they just don't do it because "we don't need it". It's a sign of decadence, and you can see it in the history of all corporate behemoths. Once Microsoft became huge, everything became "Microsoft This" or "Windows That" - they stopped making bets, and just leveraged their established brands. The rebirth was a fountain of fresh brands: Azure, Surface, Office365. "Apple Music" and "Apple TV" are one of the many symptoms of a culturally-dying corporation. Like Microsoft, they will continue to be fabulously rich for decades, maybe score the occasional win like the move to ARM. But the new booms will come from elsewhere.
        lucideer 5y ago
        You're right but I think this is somewhat off-topic in this thread, as the alternative to the "decadence" and conservative nature of modern Apple would not be to continue using i*; it would would be to innovate in some new & different branding direction. Neither is what KDE are doing with their persistent k* prefix: it's not decadent nor innovative. It's just stagnant.
  - tttechhh 5y ago
    Can't really grasp why an open-source project would need a great brand in the first place. The one thing that keeps me in the *nix universe is the ability to pick and choose my desired software (and hardware ofc) without being influenced by iMarketing. I really dont care if KDE has a poor brand as long as it does its job well.
    - Darmody 5y ago
      A good product without a good brand is almost useless. Good products have died because they failed to get enough attention. In this case. The more users and interest in KDE/Plasma, the better for the whole environment and the developers.
  - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
    The i originally stood for "internet" when it was a new thing for the home user. The K in KDE stands for nothing in particular.
    - jtvjan 5y ago
      The K stands for kool!
      - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
        > The K was originally suggested to stand for "Kool", but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. According to Wikipedia, however there is no citation.
        jtvjan 5y ago
        Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE, called it that in this post: https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Iat_s https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Ia...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    > Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous. Not really. The main desktop/interface, i.e. that users spend most time looking at, is called Plasma. The file manager, another high-usage application, is called Dolphin. The theme is Oxygen/Breeze. Claiming 'everything has got to have a K' is about a decade out of date. Sure there are still things like KClock, KRunner, KWin, etc. but they mostly seem to be very old projects, from back when 'everything has got to have a K'. Others, like Konqueror, Kontact, etc. seem like pretty reasonable names.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >everything has got to have a K No longer true. But nobody wants to rename well known apps like Konsole to Terminal , Kate to "Text Editor".
  - troyvit 5y ago
    I don't mind it. If I see something with a surprise K at the front or somewhere in it, I can assume it's a KDE product and I know where to go for support. Maybe it's annoying to everybody else but this branding makes my life simpler.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rimliu 5y ago
  And which company is that? (I know you mean Apple, but Apple has iPhone and iPad, and that's it.)
  - sseagull 5y ago
    Well, software/service names as well. iMessage, iCloud, iMovie. But I agree it is a little less standard than KDE putting K in front of everything
- Longhanks 5y ago
  That company has stopped doing that >5 years ago. Since then, launched products are simply called Apple Watch, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Pencil, AirPods, AirTags... Also, the original comment did not say anything about Apple. Stop trolling.
- teekert 5y ago
  Klock would be better indeed!
  - eldaisfish 5y ago
    If you follow the trend of KDE's naming scheme, you would expect KLock to be a lock, not a clock.
    - teekert 5y ago
      Like how I expect Kontact to be about ontacts and Konsole to offer me an onsole ;) (Sorry couldn't resist, I know many apps just have a normal name with a K prepended.)
  - zanderz 5y ago
    Or Kronometer!
- jorvi 5y ago
  Apple doesn't call their apps iCalculator, iCamera, iContacts, iSettings, etc
  - diffeomorphism 5y ago
    Neither does kde. That said, some/any name is vastly preferable to just "camera". If you have a question about the app how are you supposed to google for that? You start searching for "apple camera app" at which point that might as well be its name.
- dennis_moore 5y ago
  For someone who doesn't use KDE on my main distro it's great. It's a giveaway that I probably shouldn't apt-get that program. (Not that I have anything against KDE software, just the idea of installing it on non-KDE environments)
- qudat 5y ago
  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but being a copy cat does not make you innovative.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Hum... Since the Apple trend is much more recent, the KDE developers should be very flattered. Anyway, the Keverything is a copy of the Xeverything, and both are for practical reasons since they point to the requirements to run the software.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Although the iSomething branding is equally stupid, I think you've also got a case of the Kiki-effect here[1]. The harsh k-sound is a lot less pleasing to use than the soft I-sound that prefixes Apple's products. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
szszrk 5y ago
Why? And what do you propose? Knames are mostly ok, a user knows right from package list if this app is meant for his environment, or rather not. Same with gApps. The name tells what the app does. Why would I be mad at this?
- saturn_vk 5y ago
  An "app drawer" is going to look extremely weird, with every entry starting with a "K"
  - xcambar 5y ago
    Well, to be fair, if every entry starts with a "K", it won't make any difference in sorting.
    - fomine3 5y ago
      It breaks alphabetical seek bar like this https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/app-drawer-microsoft-launcher-1.jpg https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...
      - xcambar 5y ago
        You're right, but on the drawer I'm using (I don't remember the name), when no app starts with a specific letter, this letter does not show up on the vertical seek bar. :shrug:
- Darmody 5y ago
  I don't propose anything. It's just that it looks crappy to me. It's like they didn't put any thought into it. Yeah, let's put K in front of everything. It's not visually appealing and sometimes it isn't even easily pronounceable. They have some great pieces of software but marketing wise it looks like they don't want to go beyond their Kusers. This is my opinion anyway.
  - 5y ago
magicalhippo 5y ago
I found it cheesy back in the day, but I've grown to like unique names compared to generic ones. Makes it so much easier to search for when you got an issue or similar.
simion314 5y ago
Yeah, they should use "smart" names like GNOME , I am wondering how those users will google "how do I do X with Files/Browser/Player"
- gizdan 5y ago
  You Google "how do I do X with gnome player", has worked for me every time.
  - chupasaurus 5y ago
    Maybe, now try that with Files.
- zingplex 5y ago
  Easy, just use the inscrutable internal name for the application "how do I do X with Nautilus/Epiphany/Totem"
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
j1elo 5y ago
It does look crappy, IMHO. It feels like a 2000's trend that was cute (pun intended) but nowadays it's been 20 years and now looks out of date. Probably it's just me, though: at that time I was working at a company with a name starting by V. The product name itself also started by V. We used the C++ Qt framework, where every class starts with Q. So the lead devs picked up the trend and all our classes' names also started with V. Basically everything was named as something following the same letter.
- simion314 5y ago
  >So the lead devs picked up the trend and all our classes' names also started with V. Basically everything was named as something following the same letter. That can be usefull, you know by looking at a class name , if it starts with Q is a native Qt stuff, and if it starts with V is your own custom stuff. As an example if you would see a VDropDown you will know that some of the developer in the company was asked to "improve" the native dropdown , you should check if there are bugs there.
  - j1elo 5y ago
    Yes, I liked at the moment, and still today see the appeal of using a common prefix for the internals of a software project. However I don't think it's a good idea, nor pretty or attractive, that such a technical decision transpires to the public facing side of the project: first and foremost, its name.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  Like how Apple continued the NS* trend for decades?
  - j1elo 5y ago
    Yes, something like that. But I never developed specifically for Apple platforms... what is (or was) the meaning behind "NS"?
    - 5y ago
vvillena 5y ago
Kclock is a fantastic internal name for that little application. In the associated articles you can see the user-facing name for kclock is "Clock": https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-update-june/ https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-updat...

Yeah, putting "K" in front of every app/product of yours is dumb, unlike that company who puts "i" in front of everything, that's genius. /s

scrollaway 5y ago
I'm a KDE long time user and contributor, and i agree with the GP's comment. Apple does it more sparingly (now), and fairly consistently: as a product line evolved. The iMac line did it when it was "cool", the iPod was the next one, and the iPhone evolved from the iPod so it made a lot of sense (and thus so did iOS). There's not really anything else Apple names this way. Apple TV, Macbook, Airpods, Safari... Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous. It's also not a particularly "pretty" letter and you end up with names that are either purposeful misspellings, midKapitalized, are plain bad puns, or occasionally and at best, are merely oKay. KDE does not have a great brand. Apple does.
- rascul 5y ago
  Currently Apple also has iPad, iCloud, iLife, iTunes, iMessage, iMovie, and iWork. Formerly, Apple had iDVD, iPhoto, iTools, iWeb, and iSight. It might also be interesting to note that Apple licenses iOS from Cisco [0]. [0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_ios_name_to_apple_screenshot_shows_iwork_on_iphone https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_io...
  - eddieroger 5y ago
    They also have MacBook Pro, Mac mini, Mac Pro, AppleTV (+), AirPods (Pro, Max), HomePod, Pencil, Watch, HomeKit, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, Smart Keyboard. Also, Apple no longer has iLife or iTunes, and "iWork" is no longer a bundle, but even if it was, its apps are Pages, Keynote and Numbers. No "i"s there. They use the "i" prefix more sparingly now, as the original post said.
    - abrowne 5y ago
      iBooks is now Books too.
  - lucideer 5y ago
    That sounds exactly like it was used sparingly: Apple have a lot more than 12 products. I've never heard of iLife, iTools, iWeb, iWork or iSight so its use in flagship products is even more sensibly sparing. iTunes has been replaced by Apple Music, and possibly iMovie too??? It's also worth noting Apple has been somewhat mocked got their overuse of i. Despite the sparing use. So KDE tacking it onto everything is even less sensible in this context. I think the K naming has probably hampered adoption of KDE products in the long term: I was always resistant to install K* apps when I was using a non-KDE desktop due to compatibility paranoia, something I tended not to even consider when installing gnome/gtk apps for example (which tend mostly not to be prefixed with g or gtk- or similar)
    - toyg 5y ago
      > That sounds exactly like it was used sparingly [...] iTunes has been replaced [...] , and possibly iMovie too The i-branding was very, very effective. Apple was one of the very few brands that really managed to "own" the internet in the mind of the average consumer. Which is one of the reasons it was wildly successful. The new branding, in comparison, is meh. They now just leverage "Apple". Nothing else, because they think they are too good. Creating new brands is difficult and risky, so they just don't do it because "we don't need it". It's a sign of decadence, and you can see it in the history of all corporate behemoths. Once Microsoft became huge, everything became "Microsoft This" or "Windows That" - they stopped making bets, and just leveraged their established brands. The rebirth was a fountain of fresh brands: Azure, Surface, Office365. "Apple Music" and "Apple TV" are one of the many symptoms of a culturally-dying corporation. Like Microsoft, they will continue to be fabulously rich for decades, maybe score the occasional win like the move to ARM. But the new booms will come from elsewhere.
      - lucideer 5y ago
        You're right but I think this is somewhat off-topic in this thread, as the alternative to the "decadence" and conservative nature of modern Apple would not be to continue using i*; it would would be to innovate in some new & different branding direction. Neither is what KDE are doing with their persistent k* prefix: it's not decadent nor innovative. It's just stagnant.
- tttechhh 5y ago
  Can't really grasp why an open-source project would need a great brand in the first place. The one thing that keeps me in the *nix universe is the ability to pick and choose my desired software (and hardware ofc) without being influenced by iMarketing. I really dont care if KDE has a poor brand as long as it does its job well.
  - Darmody 5y ago
    A good product without a good brand is almost useless. Good products have died because they failed to get enough attention. In this case. The more users and interest in KDE/Plasma, the better for the whole environment and the developers.
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  The i originally stood for "internet" when it was a new thing for the home user. The K in KDE stands for nothing in particular.
  - jtvjan 5y ago
    The K stands for kool!
    - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
      > The K was originally suggested to stand for "Kool", but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. According to Wikipedia, however there is no citation.
      - jtvjan 5y ago
        Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE, called it that in this post: https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Iat_s https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Ia...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  > Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous. Not really. The main desktop/interface, i.e. that users spend most time looking at, is called Plasma. The file manager, another high-usage application, is called Dolphin. The theme is Oxygen/Breeze. Claiming 'everything has got to have a K' is about a decade out of date. Sure there are still things like KClock, KRunner, KWin, etc. but they mostly seem to be very old projects, from back when 'everything has got to have a K'. Others, like Konqueror, Kontact, etc. seem like pretty reasonable names.
- simion314 5y ago
  >everything has got to have a K No longer true. But nobody wants to rename well known apps like Konsole to Terminal , Kate to "Text Editor".
- troyvit 5y ago
  I don't mind it. If I see something with a surprise K at the front or somewhere in it, I can assume it's a KDE product and I know where to go for support. Maybe it's annoying to everybody else but this branding makes my life simpler.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rimliu 5y ago
And which company is that? (I know you mean Apple, but Apple has iPhone and iPad, and that's it.)
- sseagull 5y ago
  Well, software/service names as well. iMessage, iCloud, iMovie. But I agree it is a little less standard than KDE putting K in front of everything
Longhanks 5y ago
That company has stopped doing that >5 years ago. Since then, launched products are simply called Apple Watch, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Pencil, AirPods, AirTags... Also, the original comment did not say anything about Apple. Stop trolling.
teekert 5y ago
Klock would be better indeed!
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  If you follow the trend of KDE's naming scheme, you would expect KLock to be a lock, not a clock.
  - teekert 5y ago
    Like how I expect Kontact to be about ontacts and Konsole to offer me an onsole ;) (Sorry couldn't resist, I know many apps just have a normal name with a K prepended.)
- zanderz 5y ago
  Or Kronometer!
jorvi 5y ago
Apple doesn't call their apps iCalculator, iCamera, iContacts, iSettings, etc
- diffeomorphism 5y ago
  Neither does kde. That said, some/any name is vastly preferable to just "camera". If you have a question about the app how are you supposed to google for that? You start searching for "apple camera app" at which point that might as well be its name.
dennis_moore 5y ago
For someone who doesn't use KDE on my main distro it's great. It's a giveaway that I probably shouldn't apt-get that program. (Not that I have anything against KDE software, just the idea of installing it on non-KDE environments)
qudat 5y ago
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but being a copy cat does not make you innovative.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Hum... Since the Apple trend is much more recent, the KDE developers should be very flattered. Anyway, the Keverything is a copy of the Xeverything, and both are for practical reasons since they point to the requirements to run the software.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Although the iSomething branding is equally stupid, I think you've also got a case of the Kiki-effect here[1]. The harsh k-sound is a lot less pleasing to use than the soft I-sound that prefixes Apple's products. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

szszrk 5y ago

Why? And what do you propose? Knames are mostly ok, a user knows right from package list if this app is meant for his environment, or rather not. Same with gApps. The name tells what the app does. Why would I be mad at this?

saturn_vk 5y ago
An "app drawer" is going to look extremely weird, with every entry starting with a "K"
- xcambar 5y ago
  Well, to be fair, if every entry starts with a "K", it won't make any difference in sorting.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    It breaks alphabetical seek bar like this https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/app-drawer-microsoft-launcher-1.jpg https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...
    - xcambar 5y ago
      You're right, but on the drawer I'm using (I don't remember the name), when no app starts with a specific letter, this letter does not show up on the vertical seek bar. :shrug:
Darmody 5y ago
I don't propose anything. It's just that it looks crappy to me. It's like they didn't put any thought into it. Yeah, let's put K in front of everything. It's not visually appealing and sometimes it isn't even easily pronounceable. They have some great pieces of software but marketing wise it looks like they don't want to go beyond their Kusers. This is my opinion anyway.
- 5y ago

magicalhippo 5y ago

I found it cheesy back in the day, but I've grown to like unique names compared to generic ones. Makes it so much easier to search for when you got an issue or similar.

simion314 5y ago

Yeah, they should use "smart" names like GNOME , I am wondering how those users will google "how do I do X with Files/Browser/Player"

gizdan 5y ago
You Google "how do I do X with gnome player", has worked for me every time.
- chupasaurus 5y ago
  Maybe, now try that with Files.
zingplex 5y ago
Easy, just use the inscrutable internal name for the application "how do I do X with Nautilus/Epiphany/Totem"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

j1elo 5y ago

It does look crappy, IMHO. It feels like a 2000's trend that was cute (pun intended) but nowadays it's been 20 years and now looks out of date. Probably it's just me, though: at that time I was working at a company with a name starting by V. The product name itself also started by V. We used the C++ Qt framework, where every class starts with Q. So the lead devs picked up the trend and all our classes' names also started with V. Basically everything was named as something following the same letter.

simion314 5y ago
>So the lead devs picked up the trend and all our classes' names also started with V. Basically everything was named as something following the same letter. That can be usefull, you know by looking at a class name , if it starts with Q is a native Qt stuff, and if it starts with V is your own custom stuff. As an example if you would see a VDropDown you will know that some of the developer in the company was asked to "improve" the native dropdown , you should check if there are bugs there.
- j1elo 5y ago
  Yes, I liked at the moment, and still today see the appeal of using a common prefix for the internals of a software project. However I don't think it's a good idea, nor pretty or attractive, that such a technical decision transpires to the public facing side of the project: first and foremost, its name.
e3bc54b2 5y ago
Like how Apple continued the NS* trend for decades?
- j1elo 5y ago
  Yes, something like that. But I never developed specifically for Apple platforms... what is (or was) the meaning behind "NS"?
  - 5y ago

vvillena 5y ago

Kclock is a fantastic internal name for that little application. In the associated articles you can see the user-facing name for kclock is "Clock": https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-update-june/ https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-updat...