4 ms·

Can’t help feeling the “-Libre” “Libre-“ branding on projects is cursed. Naming things matters and if FireFox had been called WebLibre or LibreBrowser it would

Can’t help feeling the “-Libre” “Libre-“ branding on projects is cursed. Naming things matters and if FireFox had been called WebLibre or LibreBrowser it would have been far less appealing. There’s just something lame about it and it’s too many syllables, same deal with XLibre.

klabb3 1y ago
Fun fact: libre is an ancient Latin term for "any UX or design concerns will be ignored".
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  In Spanish it just means "free" but like the GNU catchphrase, it doesn't mean free beer, its associated more so with the word liberty.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  In that case, sign me up. It's one of those fields where the more work that goes into it, the worse it gets.
  - whywhywhywhy 1y ago
    Blender is testament against that and the only free software that has made huge inroads into creative work and it only happened after serious UI/UX work
  - staplers 1y ago
    All of computation is evidence against this. Are you getting raw gps coordinates for directions in your car?
    - dlcarrier 1y ago
      I guess that would be preferable to Google Map's current interface of showing a blue line, for the path I should follow, as opposed to a different blue line, for the other roads that I shouldn't follow. I've given up on it, and just use a list of turns and distances, because that way I miss the turns far less often.
  - klabb3 1y ago
    You are conflating design with bloat. It's not the designers fault that click tracker SDKs and 15 microservices with eventual consistency is running in the background. They didn't make the mobile app 300MB. Obviously designers can destroy products too, but we got much bigger problems than that in 2025. Most of the garbage today come from business decisions and technical fads.
    - dlcarrier 1y ago
      I agree that applications, especially ones using web interfaces, gain significant bloat with each iteration, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I'm complaining about. If all that changed was that everything ran slower and took more battery power and increased the liklihood of closing when backgrounded, that's all I would be complaining about, but what I'm conplaining about here is that updates lead to reduced feature sets, buttons and links that are impossible to differentiate from inactive elements, and icons that vaguely hint at a skuemorphic past, but look more like hamburgers, kebabs, and petifores than what they're actually supposed to respresent. What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words? Wait, I take that back, please don't make menus that consist entirely of abstract shapes and squiggles. (https://f-droid.org/repo/org.woheller69.browser/en-US/phoneScreenshots/05.png https://f-droid.org/repo/org.woheller69.browser/en-US/phoneS...)
      - klabb3 1y ago
        Fair points. I agree the flat monochrome design of today have issues. The example you linked is atrocious. > What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words? The truth is that real estate became incredibly constrained with mobile, and hover also disappeared. Imo the hamburgers and triple dots are close to how good you can get on mobile. There's little point in adding the word "menu" or "options". Basically any text you add on mobile would take full screen width to be safe in all languages. And thats pretty much what open menus look like - they take over the whole screen. Due to mobile being the primary target, a lot of devs reuse those GUIs for much bigger screens, which is unfortunate.
bobajeff 1y ago
I always think of Lucha libre which I always thought of as tacky and silly.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I tried to watch WWF in Puerto Rico the 90s but just didn't understand why all my friends liked it. I still don't. I did play the games back then though, those were more fun than watching the show. I never even bothered with Lucha Libre tbh.
  - 1oooqooq 1y ago
    i think you mean WWE... or were there pandas? anyway, to enjoy lucha libre you have to accept it's like going to the circus (and drunk). don't expect it to be a fight. which is the one i don't get instead. you have to be really deranged to enjoy box or mma
    - brewdad 1y ago
      If you go back far enough, WWE was called WWF. Certainly true in it's initial heyday of Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant.
    - Duanemclemore 1y ago
      It only changed in the mid to late nineties because they lost a lawsuit to the panda. I still wonder what would have happened if they instead settled to keep the acronym in return for giving massive PR to the World Wildlife folks. As in like, having positive pro-ecological messages and characters in perpetuity. We could all be watching the World Wrestling Foundation to see the title match between (insert name of actual wrestler here) and a wrestler named The Tree Sloth or something...
    - giancarlostoro 1y ago
      That's funny I actually prefer boxing and MMA because there's a lot more at stake than most other sports. I respect that they have to train to be as optimal as possible to do those sports where you risk much more. I don't go out of my way to watch them, but if a friend wants to invite me over to watch a match, I wont be as bored as if it was sportball.
tpoacher 1y ago
I feel the same with products that end in "Pro". Don't mind the "Libre" too much tbh, because I use some quality products that use it ... but yes, it's only a matter of time before marketing nerds ruin an already unappealing term
- brewdad 1y ago
  Pro can work well in distinguishing a paid product from it's free counterpart but Grocery List Maker Pro gets a bit silly.
- deleted 1y ago
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antithesizer 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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flossposse 1y ago
Is there any effective way to signal to the users who care that your product is committed to Free/Libre Open source principles without also making it sound lame?
Galanwe 1y ago
> There’s just something lame about it It's even more lame when you're French. Joke aside, I agree with you, the "libre" suffix/prefix carries some undertones of "it's going to be old and ugly but open source".
- tpoacher 1y ago
  it's going to be old and ugly for now
  - brewdad 1y ago
    Someday it will be newly improved and uglier
  - wongarsu 1y ago
    My first association with -libre in product names is LibreOffice. And that has managed to look old and ugly for as long as I can remember, with little to no improvement
    - bigfishrunning 1y ago
      It was ugly when it was called StarOffice, and also ugly when it was called OpenOffice. So calling it LibreOffice should have been obvious from the start!
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      LibreOffice did have some nice improvements over OpenOffice. Really, office suites are kind of a late-90’s concept anyway, so having UI that looks weird by modern standards is appropriate probably.
    - tpoacher 1y ago
      odd that you say this, libreoffice is the first of those high quality products i had in mind. it looks clean, friendly, and everything just works. whenever i am forced to use msoffice it's a cringeworthy experience. is this opinion based on recent experiences of the libreoffice suite?
IshKebab 1y ago
I agree. It's lame, difficult to pronounce, and clearly identifies the project as something that only RMS-level uber-nerds would care about. Terrible name.
- 1gn15 1y ago
  Given the current situation on Android, we definitely need more RMS-level uber-nerds!
  - Finnucane 1y ago
    Well, maybe not entirely rms-level.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    Definitely not. RMS-level uber-nerds are easy to dismiss because they have genuinely crazy views, and also because they tend to be super weird people. We may agree with RMS that we should be free to own our computers and run whatever we want on them. But he says that commercial software should not exist. That's clearly insane, which makes it easy to dismiss everything he says as insane, even if a lot of it isn't. Similarly, the man himself is extremely weird and creepy. It's easy to dismiss him on those grounds too even if they don't directly relate to tech things. What we definitely need is more normal people with normal view that support normal software freedoms without going to crazy extremes.
- kwanbix 1y ago
  Well, it is difficult to pronounce if you don't speak spanish, portuguese, italian, and probably others. For me, as native Spanish speaker is super easy to say.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    The difficulty is that it doesn't follow unambiguous English pronunciation heuristics. For example, I have no problem pronouncing "ender" because it has no elements that have unambiguous pronunciation. I also have no problem pronouncing "centre", because it's a well known word with well known pronunciation. But libre is not an existing English word, and "-bre" does not have an unambiguous pronunciation heuristics, so it's unclear how it is intended to be pronounced. Not an issue in Spanish because it is (apparently) a word in Spanish. Another example of a bad naming is Forgejo. Terrible. I'm sure it has very clear pronunciation if you speak Esperanto.

klabb3 1y ago

Fun fact: libre is an ancient Latin term for "any UX or design concerns will be ignored".

giancarlostoro 1y ago
In Spanish it just means "free" but like the GNU catchphrase, it doesn't mean free beer, its associated more so with the word liberty.
dlcarrier 1y ago
In that case, sign me up. It's one of those fields where the more work that goes into it, the worse it gets.
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  Blender is testament against that and the only free software that has made huge inroads into creative work and it only happened after serious UI/UX work
- staplers 1y ago
  All of computation is evidence against this. Are you getting raw gps coordinates for directions in your car?
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    I guess that would be preferable to Google Map's current interface of showing a blue line, for the path I should follow, as opposed to a different blue line, for the other roads that I shouldn't follow. I've given up on it, and just use a list of turns and distances, because that way I miss the turns far less often.
- klabb3 1y ago
  You are conflating design with bloat. It's not the designers fault that click tracker SDKs and 15 microservices with eventual consistency is running in the background. They didn't make the mobile app 300MB. Obviously designers can destroy products too, but we got much bigger problems than that in 2025. Most of the garbage today come from business decisions and technical fads.
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    I agree that applications, especially ones using web interfaces, gain significant bloat with each iteration, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I'm complaining about. If all that changed was that everything ran slower and took more battery power and increased the liklihood of closing when backgrounded, that's all I would be complaining about, but what I'm conplaining about here is that updates lead to reduced feature sets, buttons and links that are impossible to differentiate from inactive elements, and icons that vaguely hint at a skuemorphic past, but look more like hamburgers, kebabs, and petifores than what they're actually supposed to respresent. What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words? Wait, I take that back, please don't make menus that consist entirely of abstract shapes and squiggles. (https://f-droid.org/repo/org.woheller69.browser/en-US/phoneScreenshots/05.png https://f-droid.org/repo/org.woheller69.browser/en-US/phoneS...)
    - klabb3 1y ago
      Fair points. I agree the flat monochrome design of today have issues. The example you linked is atrocious. > What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words? The truth is that real estate became incredibly constrained with mobile, and hover also disappeared. Imo the hamburgers and triple dots are close to how good you can get on mobile. There's little point in adding the word "menu" or "options". Basically any text you add on mobile would take full screen width to be safe in all languages. And thats pretty much what open menus look like - they take over the whole screen. Due to mobile being the primary target, a lot of devs reuse those GUIs for much bigger screens, which is unfortunate.

bobajeff 1y ago

I always think of Lucha libre which I always thought of as tacky and silly.

giancarlostoro 1y ago
I tried to watch WWF in Puerto Rico the 90s but just didn't understand why all my friends liked it. I still don't. I did play the games back then though, those were more fun than watching the show. I never even bothered with Lucha Libre tbh.
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  i think you mean WWE... or were there pandas? anyway, to enjoy lucha libre you have to accept it's like going to the circus (and drunk). don't expect it to be a fight. which is the one i don't get instead. you have to be really deranged to enjoy box or mma
  - brewdad 1y ago
    If you go back far enough, WWE was called WWF. Certainly true in it's initial heyday of Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant.
  - Duanemclemore 1y ago
    It only changed in the mid to late nineties because they lost a lawsuit to the panda. I still wonder what would have happened if they instead settled to keep the acronym in return for giving massive PR to the World Wildlife folks. As in like, having positive pro-ecological messages and characters in perpetuity. We could all be watching the World Wrestling Foundation to see the title match between (insert name of actual wrestler here) and a wrestler named The Tree Sloth or something...
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    That's funny I actually prefer boxing and MMA because there's a lot more at stake than most other sports. I respect that they have to train to be as optimal as possible to do those sports where you risk much more. I don't go out of my way to watch them, but if a friend wants to invite me over to watch a match, I wont be as bored as if it was sportball.

tpoacher 1y ago

I feel the same with products that end in "Pro". Don't mind the "Libre" too much tbh, because I use some quality products that use it ... but yes, it's only a matter of time before marketing nerds ruin an already unappealing term

brewdad 1y ago
Pro can work well in distinguishing a paid product from it's free counterpart but Grocery List Maker Pro gets a bit silly.
deleted 1y ago
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antithesizer 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago

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flossposse 1y ago

Is there any effective way to signal to the users who care that your product is committed to Free/Libre Open source principles without also making it sound lame?

Galanwe 1y ago

> There’s just something lame about it It's even more lame when you're French. Joke aside, I agree with you, the "libre" suffix/prefix carries some undertones of "it's going to be old and ugly but open source".

tpoacher 1y ago
it's going to be old and ugly for now
- brewdad 1y ago
  Someday it will be newly improved and uglier
- wongarsu 1y ago
  My first association with -libre in product names is LibreOffice. And that has managed to look old and ugly for as long as I can remember, with little to no improvement
  - bigfishrunning 1y ago
    It was ugly when it was called StarOffice, and also ugly when it was called OpenOffice. So calling it LibreOffice should have been obvious from the start!
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    LibreOffice did have some nice improvements over OpenOffice. Really, office suites are kind of a late-90’s concept anyway, so having UI that looks weird by modern standards is appropriate probably.
  - tpoacher 1y ago
    odd that you say this, libreoffice is the first of those high quality products i had in mind. it looks clean, friendly, and everything just works. whenever i am forced to use msoffice it's a cringeworthy experience. is this opinion based on recent experiences of the libreoffice suite?

IshKebab 1y ago

I agree. It's lame, difficult to pronounce, and clearly identifies the project as something that only RMS-level uber-nerds would care about. Terrible name.

1gn15 1y ago
Given the current situation on Android, we definitely need more RMS-level uber-nerds!
- Finnucane 1y ago
  Well, maybe not entirely rms-level.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Definitely not. RMS-level uber-nerds are easy to dismiss because they have genuinely crazy views, and also because they tend to be super weird people. We may agree with RMS that we should be free to own our computers and run whatever we want on them. But he says that commercial software should not exist. That's clearly insane, which makes it easy to dismiss everything he says as insane, even if a lot of it isn't. Similarly, the man himself is extremely weird and creepy. It's easy to dismiss him on those grounds too even if they don't directly relate to tech things. What we definitely need is more normal people with normal view that support normal software freedoms without going to crazy extremes.
kwanbix 1y ago
Well, it is difficult to pronounce if you don't speak spanish, portuguese, italian, and probably others. For me, as native Spanish speaker is super easy to say.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  The difficulty is that it doesn't follow unambiguous English pronunciation heuristics. For example, I have no problem pronouncing "ender" because it has no elements that have unambiguous pronunciation. I also have no problem pronouncing "centre", because it's a well known word with well known pronunciation. But libre is not an existing English word, and "-bre" does not have an unambiguous pronunciation heuristics, so it's unclear how it is intended to be pronounced. Not an issue in Spanish because it is (apparently) a word in Spanish. Another example of a bad naming is Forgejo. Terrible. I'm sure it has very clear pronunciation if you speak Esperanto.