comrade you are posting this on hexbear dot net
this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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You don't know. You weren't in the trenches. You don't know half of the ridiculous and reddit-coded software names that have been and still live like ghosts in the lower levels of your OS. Ever heard of a recursive acronym? Words from obscure sci-fi original serieses scar the land of open-source software.
You know, I have a soft spot for gen X nerd culture so it kind of warms my heart to see their legacy show up in open source software
Also sorry to any gen xers here for acting like you're dead. You know what I mean, yeah?
In all seriousness, I'm a bit young for much of it, but I know how to you feel. I feel like the idea of 'niche' has been destroyed lately. Everything is popular and nothing is unheard of. I miss having stuff that I and a few other dedicated people know about.
the corporatization of MTG deck names has been a travesty. You WILL NOT name combo decks after breakfast food, you WILL use guild or clan names for colors even though the strategy has nothing to do with ravnica. Your favorite plane will be new york city.
I prefer to imagine that there are irl scenes for various interests that never discuss scene matters on the internet, and I just don't know about them. It is heartening to think that perhaps I'm just not cool 
You gotta get into woodworking or architecture, there's words nobody's ever heard of in there.
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Have you HERD of GNU HURD?
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There is millions of softwares, pieces of softwares and such through time and platforms. They all need names. The need to be unique because it is hella confusing when 2 softwares are called the same thing. You cant install them both on the same computer, and you can be reading the wrong documentations. There is no central place where you can find out what every software ever is named.
Real issue is the prevelance of Anglo chauvinism.
Wait till you find out that less is actually a successor to more
grep! sed the awk as it cat to ed
Well less is more
Serious answer is that each component is it's own project named for all kinds of reasons; often somekind of reference to a previous thing that they're trying to replace, sometimes to fit into an ecosystem or org's scheme, sometimes an initialism no-one thought to say out loud, sometimes it's a flippant name for quick throwaway program that then somehow becomes major infrastructure but it's too late to change it now.
ok and what is the nonserious answer 
Computers work by magic and they are concealing their true names to prevent privelege escalation vunerabilities.
HAH. I KNEW IT
this is also why power-cycling works.
That's more of a death threat to the pixies
sometimes it's a flippant name for quick throwaway program that then somehow becomes major infrastructure but it's too late to change it now.
That's 99% of it. Naming things suck, and as soon as you share it and people start using it you can't change the name.
I feel like around the late 2010s we started getting more "serious" names for things. I do always love the packageN scheme though. Especially when there's like no historical record or real usage of versions 1-(N-1) lol
Python is littered with numbered packages that don't have any maintained or distributed precursors anymore, but they're forever urllib3, jinja2 or httplib2.
Remember, folks: Wine Is Not an Emulator.
I agreed at the beginning, until I realized that I don't have to know the program names at all:
The search knows that I want a "file explorer" (/internet explorer). So far, this worked for everything I tried.
Don't even get me started on when the main command for a package is something like "fastfuck" and you dont have it so you type sudo apt install fastfuck and its not called that in the fucking debian repo! So you have to start doing apt search package to find it. Until finally you realize the package is called "fuckfast" or something else slightly different.
Libfoobar, foobarlib, foobar-lib, foobar is actually is in barfoo-dev
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I do like when some operating systems have an autocorrect that asks you if you want to install fuckfast. Even better if they let you just type Y/N to install it immediately.
My ideal would be as soon as you type the command that doesn't exist it says, "Oh, that command is from 1.[package], 2.[package], and 3.[package] but you don't have them. Do you want to install them now? [1, 2, 3 to select which, no for none, or all for all.]"
That is just the beauty of foss diversity.
Like humans either being referred to as a number or having proper names that have/had a background & a team that loves them. Linux is more transparent & no central thing (even like a distro) will sterilise it as much as a megacorp will their OS.
well its all free stuff people coded in their spare time mostly so there's no glitzy marketing firm naming the whizbangdoodle something catchy
Glitzy marketing firms have never named something something dumb.
By the way, have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob.
What's Figma?
figma balls lmao gottem
Steve Jobs died from it.
sure, that's totally a valid point. many services are born from a start-up that was at one point a person who just came up with a name, but often though when trying to sell something you want the name of the thing to be catchy or memorable.
when you're writing free software it tends to have more of a personal meaning to you and you might not care so much if anyone else likes it or can even pronounce it
Free software also tends to last a lot longer than proprietary software* and that means you get an absurd cross section of every goofy naming trend in the last several decades. So you've got your abbreviations with your acronyms with your hacker cultures with your overconfidently naming it the most generic thing possibles with your unrelated nouns with your nonsense toy names.
*Well, most projects die immediately, same as with proprietary. But at the long tail there are 40 year old programs still kicking
40 year old programs still kicking
Look, emacs sucks. Any emacs user will tell you that it sucks. Its just that its the best thing we have ever encountered. We've searched for better programs, and they all come up short. Emacs is just the best thing out there. Would be a lot better with proper stewardship tho.....
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look at this comrade hating fun smdh 
sometimes you need a little whimsy
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I find the names are either like that or they're just literally what they say on the tin
Software Manager, Libre Office how straight forward and helpful!
And then you have dolphin
Why is the file browser named dolphin
Just call it a file browser
Serious answer is that there is no one true file browser. A file browser is a software project that has the same concerns as anyother. Distributors (ie your distro) will require a name and if the project doesn't have one then it will either not get distributed or the distros will distingush it themselves which could get messy (dolphin could for eg be called "KDE File browser", but konqeror already exists so "KDE file browser 2"? What happens when different distros choose different names for "File Browser"?). The project if it is to be a sustainable one also must distinguish itself from the other file browser projects inorder to grow a userbase and recruit volunteer developers. How does it do that but by building some kind of brand identity? Dolphin is a better brand name than File Browser #2345.
That makes sense
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The best explanation I could find in a pinch is that Linux file managers tend to be opaquely named in reference to Windows Explorer, i.e. that historical real-world explorers were sailors, so a lot of Linux file managers will have names related to marine life, seafaring cultures, and sailors in popular culture. GNOME Files was originally called Nautilus apparently to evoke the idea of an operating system shell, but the Nautilus was also Captain Nemo's submarine, so Nautilus' fork was called Nemo. Thunar, my own file manager, is named after Thor, apparently because Vikings were famous seafaring explorers.
I can't find anything about why Dolphin specifically has its name, but a theory I saw was that it's just called that because dolphins are a traditional good luck omen and sign of nearby land for sailors. But for all I know Dolphin could be named after a specific vessel, or maybe it's named in reference to the two-dolphin badges worn by qualified submariners in many different countries, sort of sticking to the submarine theme of Nautilus/Nemo.
But maybe more importantly than that, the file managers on Linux have distinctive names to stand out from each other, because Linux users are a lot more likely than Windows users to actually do stuff like try out different file managers and form strong opinions about them, or use two different file managers at the same time. As long as the icon and name makes it clear what it does, which is the case on my own computer (it's called Thunar File Manager and it has a folder icon), then it isn't really a problem. If it was just called "Thunar" and nothing else, and its icon was a hammer, then it would be bad for UX.
well it is keeping with the aquatic theme. Gnome's file browser is Nautilus.
GNOME handles this well by having its core apps drop their codename and use their generic name. So Nautilus became "Files" in the app overview.
So at least this is a known issue.
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I believe Dolphin is named Dolphin since it was the codename for the Gamecube.
There are also a bunch of really boring named programs out there. e.g. Gnome Text Editor.
Dolphin is the KDE file explorer.
Oh yeah. It's been a hot minute since I used KDE. Been using GNOME 3 for the last 4 or so years.
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