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Comment by ognarb | Hacker News Reader

This sort of comments really annoys me. Google call it's mail client gmail and everone is fine with it, kde does the same a few years before and call it's mail client kmail and people complains about the name all the time. Same thing with apple and it's i-names scheme for their hardware and software products.

I'm not sayint that the k-names are great and new kde applications try to avoid using it, but then a big company does it and has a big marketing budget, nobody minds it.

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I think the point is that it's cheesy to use the letter as the start of a word, like spelling 'c' words with a 'k'.

That's why I think 'Krita' is a good name, and 'Konqueror' not so much.

Yeah it's cheesy but if you want to appear professional it just doesn't kut it, at least not to me .. I mean KDE is great and all, but I wish there was some committee or some board of members trying to actually design the whole user experience.

But this is many times the problem with open source desktop environments, and I don't really see any easy way to fix it .. some people have tried to create unified experiences, but those are mostly forgotten with time.

> Yeah it's cheesy but if you want to appear professional it just doesn't kut it, at least not to me

You misread your parent commenter. They meant "cheesy" as a negative thing.

> I wish there was some committee or some board of members trying to actually design the whole user experience

There is: the Visual Design Group [1].

> But this is many times the problem with open source desktop environments

Oh, and Gnome too: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design So that's two of the two major open source DE that actually have teams "trying to actually design the whole user experience".

Feel free to join them.

About Gimp, this is a word that does not mean anything in most parts of the world. But actually, I think most people don't care that much. Names is not the among the problems people mention when they struggle with the open source world.

A goofy name is interpreted like flirting. If she's into you it's cool. If she's not, you're a creep.

Well GMail rhymes nicely, Gee-mail, and it's pretty obvious what it does. KMail doesn't have the same rhythm to it, it sounds slightly middle eastern or german, like maybe it's a Polish software package or something..

The difference is these big companies spend a lot of time thinking about the application names, iPhone is genius in how simple it is.

I mean there are good names also, Linux in itself is a good name for example, it's unique and doesn't sound dorky. And Firefox and some others, I'm not blaming all of them.

Gimp might have been a good name in the mid-to-late 90s when the development of Gimp and Gnome began, but still sticking to it just doesn't make much sense to me.

"GMail" doesn't make me think of that hillbilly scene in Pulp Fiction every time I try to use the program though. It was a funny scene but not the sort of thing I want to be associated with professionally. If someone says "I use [the] GIMP" I'm not going to be able to avoid thinking "oh like those hillbillies he he he" - I might be able to avoid saying that out loud.

Being associated with uninventive names like GMail, Linux or Konqueror is a pretty comfortable level of goofiness for a professional setting. They don't mean anything, maybe we can all groan at how uninventive they are, but at least they are boring and have no real connotations and won't tempt me to make a joke that'd annoy HR. I wouldn't be the only one thinking that either.

That’s the one. Anytime I read about Gimp, my head goes „Bring out the Gimp.“ and I can’t take it seriously anymore. Then again, we’re just old people remembering an old movie, so maybe this doesn’t even ring true for young people anymore?

> This sort of comments really annoys me. Google call it's mail client gmail and everone is fine with it,

huh? it's absolutely not, it's goofy as hell. I regularly have contacts / clients / etc... be like "gmail ? that's not serious".

Because it's a free product mostly intended for personal use, not because of the naming.

One expects a name@company.com style structure for professionals. It being called Gmail is not relevant.

Are all of your clients/contacts boomers? Old school jocks/bullies?

Honestly, picking up about Gmail name in 2022 is a bit anachronistic.

That is not my experience at all. Tons of big companies use Gmail in my country. Obviously they have their own domains but they use Gmail.

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