Brief and Unhinged Rant on Modern Linux Naming Conventions

"Alpaca" is an animal, not a piece of software.

Earlier today, a friend of mine asked me to recommend him some good FOSS audiobook players. I was like "yeah sure buddy, you can either use Cozy or Voice!” As soon as those words exited my mouth I just had to take a step back and ponder. Just contemplate how we got to this point as a society.

I proceeded to go on a bender, so this piece might be a bit more unhinged than normal. It won’t be my most professional or nuanced piece, but, hey, it might make good content.

There is a plague, an insanity, a curse among a lot of FOSS (and especially Linux) applications I’m seeing these past couple years.

Rather than explain my point, I’m going to list off some FOSS applications that I regularly use, interact with, and find myself recommending to my friends. Try to see if you can spot the pattern.

• Matrix

• Element

• Voice

• Cozy

• Lollypop

• Seal

• Thunder

• Cheese

• Alpaca

I haven’t even told you what any of these applications do, but can you spot the pattern? Can you tell me what ANY of these applications actually do or what their purpose is? Can you go onto your favorite search engine right now and figure it out using only that keyword?

“Hey ChatGPT, what is Voice?”

Yeah, thought so.

“Oh, you can just type ‘matrix foss’ or ‘matrix chat application’ and you’ll get the right search results!” I’m sorry, but this is Stockholm Syndrome speaking. You are the frog being boiled in the pot right now. You will be cooked and you will be eaten by a Frenchman. That is your fate in life.

Now look what happens when you bother to name your app something sensible.

Isn’t that so much easier? When I tell someone what VLC is, they know what I am talking about. Crazy concept, isn’t it?

“Well Apple does the same thing, they’re named after a fruit!” Okay, cool, fantastic point – get back to me when you get a $3 trillion dollar market cap and the advertising budget to propagandize the world into associating your product with basic words. Even then, there’s a reason half this country has iPhone and not “Phone” or “Talk”.

So, what gives, how did this absolute travesty of a practice even come to happen in the first place? Surely, surely there’s style guidelines and established conventions by those who know better to stop people from naming their hobby projects after words so generic you wouldn’t even be able to reserve them as domain names.

Then I opened the GNOME style guidelines.

I’M SORRY, WHAT? THIS IS BEING RECOMMENDED? Look, I get that GNOME has this whole emphasis on visual and brand cohesion, but come on! These applications are used all the time even by people outside of the GNOME ecosystem! A lot of them are actually really well designed and have interfaces that are intuitive and not a headache to use!

But if I’m ever having a problem where I need to troubleshoot problems that arise with ANY of these, if I ever want to talk about and share these with friends, if I want to find the available information and coverage of this online, it turns into an absolute nightmare.

Like do we really have to name a camera app “Cheese” instead of “CheeseCam”? Is that such a tall ask? Are the brains of normies going to explode when the word “camera” is being alluded to in the name of their camera application?

This aesthetic of seamlessness and cohesion might have a clean feel to it, but it’s only until things stop working.