What's In a Name?

Anyone that quotes John Dvorak as an authority needs to be ignored (at best)

Had he done a little sleuthing he would have noticed that Kubuntu actually is a word and means "to humanity" . Very appropriate and quite cool in my book

actually, if you notice...I didn't quote him as "an authority"

But thanks for putting words in my mouth...Its always nice to mislead people eh?

Ubuntu means something along the lines of (depending on which site you read)...

a person can only be a person through being kind to others

without forgiveness there is no future

a human is only a human by being a human to others

Bearing in mind the vision for this distro has South African origins - a land in need of healing if ever there was one - the name starts to make more sense.

Bearing in mind what humanity is currently doing to each other and its home, ANY kind of positivity is welcome

Edubuntu = educational ubuntu Kubuntu = KDE Ubuntu

devnet... You having a slow day?

Opinions are like a$$holes, everybody's got one.

Next story.

I agree with DavNet, the naming of products, applications, distros etc... are becoming a little too much. Many are weird and don't make much sense at all. A name has to be easy to remember and pronounce. It should sound nice and cute. We shouldn't have to twist our tongue too much to say it. Some of the names are so outrageously ridiculous they turn off people by just hearing them. Names don't have to be one word, they can be two and still nice, easy to remember and most of the time are meaningful. I say enough of this nonsense.

Ubuntu is fine. We know the meaning and doesn't sound that bad Ubuntu Linux is fine Ubunbu KDE is fine Ubuntu Edu is fine

I wont say anything about KDE names because I like KDE. But they too are excessive in naming the various applications.

May be before a product is officially named, suggestions can be made and a poll could be conducted. Then again, there are too many people with weird sense of humour (like me) and we might end up worse than we started with.

The only reason I bring the naming convention up with Ubuntu is because it is fast becoming the 'accepted' distro in all walks of life...desktop and laptop, home and work; even OEM's are considering having laptops/desktops installed with it. With this foray into corp. world...it makes sense to NOT try to make yourself sound cool and be trendy or silly. Simplicity is usually key.

Just an opinion of course.

Sal...I'm not having a slow day. Nowhere did I discuss the meaning of the word Ubuntu. It's not relevant to the point of the opinion piece. It could mean "Your father smelled of elderberries" and it wouldn't change the point of the article. It's obvious what Ubuntu means because they tell you what it means on the front page at ubuntu.com. I thought it was rather funny that some submitting comments on the blog insisted that I didn't understand the meaning of the word...Duh, front page http://ubuntu.com. Like I said, it's irrelevant to the point.

Also, I didn't question how the distros were named...but why they were named. Sure they make sense to name them Edubuntu...but why do that? To me it is silly sounding. Kinda like making a distro for and calling it Eduslack...whereas, having an entirely different name would make more sense...Kind of like Vector not naming themselves Vectorslack or something silly sounding like that. Just an opinion of course.

I was pulling your leg over the slow day thing. Sorry, English sarcasm coming through.

Names...

It stretches the vocabulary which can't hurt.

"It's fast becoming the default distro..." - I only found out yesterday that Ubuntu is now the biggest distro in the USA, not bad considering it only came out last October. However, I can understand why some people who've maybe spent a long time building up support and loyalty and a product worth having only to find some other product come racing up and take the market over are somewhat peeved. Must be heartbreaking.

I think the name works. People are surprised when I tell them what it means. It's different, it's not just some meaningless "logo-name" designed to make you remember it easily. It's not a word that flows from an english speaking tongue naturally so has a certain oddness to it. As a marketing ploy it's brilliant. But the meaning is the killer. Anything that gets people thinking "community" instead of "me" can't hurt, and Ubuntu backs it up with the price and the User Forum where you'll find help given freely.

But none of this would even be discussed if it weren't a rock solid distro with an ease of use and layout that is hard to beat. Ubuntu might just turn out to be the "killer app for Linux".

Sal,

Good points...I didn't see things that way. Probably because I'm one of those ignorant American's ;)

I see only one downside to Ubuntu...it's just not a new user friendly distro. It's a tech friendly distro for people who know how to get down and dirty with Linux but for new people who don't know anything...it's just doesn't compare.

For me, it's a great distro. I get the abilities of Debian with half the work involved to get my desktop up and running. Hopefully, they'll work on getting things to where they need to be to harness new users.

Cheers