Hacker News Reader

Comment by andyking | Hacker News Reader

Oh, for crying out loud.

I respect Mark Shuttleworth for putting his money where his mouth is; desktop Linux has come on leaps and bounds in the past few years and it's thanks in no small part to Canonical.

But you can't compare yourself to MS and Apple and, in the same breath, name your new OS "Jaunty Jackalope". What is this, one of those Words and Pictures videos they show to primary school children?! If it was an actual release codename, fair enough, but unlike other software these names seem to stick. What's wrong with "Ubuntu 9.04" or even "Ubuntu, Spring 2009"?

(I'm using, erm, Hardy.)

View on HN

As silly as the Ubuntu names are, I find them far better than Apple's codenames.

I know that whatever the dumb Ubuntu "G" name is, it's newer than the dumb "F" name, and older than the dumb "H" name. The package manager config tells me what dumb codename I'm using. It's dumb, but it works.

Then I see Mac apps that require "Tiger" or "Panther" and I have no clue what that is, or what I have. About This Mac shows a number, but what cat is that? I have to look it up on the web every single time.

Dear Steve: cat species are not ordered. It was cute for 10.1, but now it's just confusing.

They do seem to stick, but . . . am I the only one finding it increasingly difficult to remember what the names are and which release they represent. This is true of OS X, too. I use Ubuntu 8.04 and OS X 10.4. I have to stop and think what the "codenames" for those are.

Maybe it's just premature (?) senility.

I'm waiting for Sassy Sasquatch.

But I agree, the names are too silly for a serious operating system.

Who said it had to be serious? A sense of humor is always something I enjoy in products I use. a Unix system just isn't a Unix system without the bsd-games package! Silly easter eggs just make programs more fun to use; it gives them a bit of personality.

So long as they don't get in the way of using the software, I don't see the harm.

What's a serious operating system? Unix was invented to play video games, the first version of MS-DOS was called "Quick and Dirty Operating System"... And who would name his system the "Incompatible Time-Sharing System", anyway?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com