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Meanwhile, comparing the naming of human beings to programs is, well, not a very smart analogy to make. In fact, it's bordering on the ridiculous.

As is your dismissal of a problem solely because you do not experience the problem. It reminds me a lot of that classic remark in the movie "Kids", in which a carachter says he does not believe AIDS exists, simply because he does not know anyone who has AIDS.

It IS cosmetics, which means that after using it for a short time you don't notice it anymore. If something like this pisses you off that much, then maybe it's time for a little introspection.

Please, do not order me to introspect. Me, including many others, find the silly naming of applications a huge annoyance. Accept it. Disagree with it all you want, that's fine; but don't deny the existance of problems just because you do not experience the same problem.

Anyway, it confirms to me that your criticism of KDE was indeed limited to a few precise issues, and the rest was vague and/or cosmetic.

*sigh*. Why do I even bother. I'll await the reply of more eloquent folks like Aaron Seigo (see Aaron, I spelt your name right in one go!).

Well, I also find it pretty ridiculous how worked up people get about the stupid k names. Why does anyone care about this?

But, since it always seems to come up I suppose I'd support changing them. It's not like I see any pressing need to keep them the same either.

Am I right that the problem here is that everything has a k in it? So it would be better if only half the apps had one, like the i in OSX? It seems less consistent to me, but then the k never bothered me either.

Please, do not order me to introspect. Me, including many others, find the silly naming of applications a huge annoyance. Accept it.

Ok, done.

Disagree with it all you want

Also done.

Now, more importantly, in your opinion, what is a good name for an application? And I don't want some wishy washy explanation about something which subtly conveys the use of the application while still being memorable and easy to pronounce. I want a real example. Which open source project out there has a good name?

Here're a few that I think are good (biased towards KDE because those are the apps I use more often):
kwrite, kmix, kword, kpowersave, gnumeric, gnomemeeting (oops!), inkscape, ktorrent etc

With all of those apps, you immediately know which toolkit/desktop they were written for (except for inkscape), and you have a pretty good idea of what they do. kwrite? Must be for writing something, probably a text editor.

The next group of names are bad but acceptable. These are the easy to pronounce ones that have no meaning. In my opinion these names should only be used for big flagship applications so the user doesn't have to memorize a weird name for every app on the system. For example:
Ekiga - this is the new name for gnomemeeting. They went from something completely clear to something completely obtuse. Ekiga means nothing to anyone.

Consider kpdf vs evince. Now I don't think of a PDF viewer as a major app, so why bother with a stupid name like that? Just make it clear from the name what the app is good for. Yes I realize that evince will also display other formats than pdf so it's not entirely accurate to call it gpdf, but most people don't ever view PS or DVI files so it's a moot point. You could always call it gview.

Now the horrible names. I can only think of one at the moment, and that is k3b. Not only is it not a word that a normal person can speak, it also doesn't mean anything that I can tell, and it's hard to type!
k3b, the KDE 3 Burner? Who knows, it's not intuitive in any case.

Why not just call it KBurner or KBurn or BurnIt or whatever. Anything is better than k3b.

/rant over.

*sigh*. Why do I even bother. I'll await the reply of more eloquent folks like Aaron Seigo (see Aaron, I spelt your name right in one go!).

You were just itching to fit that name in somewhere, eh?

> It IS cosmetics, which means that after using it for a
> short time you don't notice it anymore.

This only happens if you use said feature all the time. As a counter-example, I have a Mac and I use Cyberduck for FTP. More than once I tried to remember that damn name because it says less than nothing about the application. It's a minor annoyance (exactly since I'm not using it often), but when I do use it then it completely distracts me from anything else I was really doing. On top of that, it does so for no good reason.