The codenames for every major Debian release are named after characters from Pixar’s Toy Story franchise. Debian’s unstable release is fittingly named after Sid, an unstable character from the Toy Story movies.
I love the Linux world’s tradition of less serious names, in general.
I guess when the OS is free, you don’t need to get the marketing people involved as much.
The kernel was almost named Freax. Then there’s GNU, Slackware, KDE which was originally the Kool Desktop Environment, The GIMP (released 1 year after Pulp Fiction), …
It’s often due to the devs creating it as a hobby project and giving it a light-hearted name to show it’s nothing professional or important - and then it becomes important later.
My favorite right now is RebeccaBlackOS, which is the only current distro built around Wayland’s reference compositor Weston, showcasing all the capabilities Wayland has.
Unlike Hannah Montana Linux, it has no Rebecca Black theming at all. It’s just called that because the dev is a fan of hers.
I find it kinda sad that KDE is attempting to stop it’s series of K-puns. I suspect that some app names are/were intentionally bad. Like Kcalc instead of Kalculator? Kome on…
Their app names were one of the main reasons I disliked KDE for a long time.
It’s just objectively impractible when half the software installed on your pc starts with the same letter.
But Gnome and Xfce aren’t any better in that regard.
I never understood this argument. Why does having common first letter bad? If you mean subjectively then sure, it may not be for everyone, but objectively?
Is gnome that bad? They seem to have been moving away from weird names for many years now.
The kernel was almost named freax
Did you know that kernel releases have codenames?
My favourite being 4.0: “Hurr durr I’ma sheep” because I remember taking part in that poll.
It made me wince when Android did away with its dessert based codenames and now they’re just ‘Android 12’ etc. It really went corporate after that direction.
And please tell me RebeccaBlackOS shows a cool popup or console message every Friday.
They didn’t:
- Android 12: Snow Cone
- Android 13: Tiramisu
- Android 14: Upside Down Cake
- Android 15: Vanilla Ice Cream
They stopped using the codenames in marketing, but they are still there.
GNU
Which stands for ‘GNU is not Unix’. Also ‘less’ (which is more). Pine is(was) Program for Internet News and Email and the FOSS fork is ‘Alpine’ or ‘Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email’. And there’s a ton more of wordplays and other more or less fun stuff on how/why things are named like they are.
Pine also competed with “elm”. And it used the “pico” editor which was replaced by “nano”…
And pico is short from ‘Pine Composer’. Nano was originally called ‘tip’ (This Is not Pico), but that name was already used by another program. And ‘elm’ besides being a tree is a short from ‘Electronic Mail’.
Isn’t KDE “Kommon Desktop Environment” in reference to CDE “Common Desktop Environment” ?
The name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems.[6] CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun through the X/Open consortium, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment.[7] The K was originally suggested to stand for “Kool”, but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Therefore, the KDE initialism expanded to “K Desktop Environment” before it was dropped altogether in favor of simply KDE in a rebranding effort in 2009.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE
(TIL the creator of KDE studied at the same university as me!)
I love the Linux world’s tradition of less serious names, in general.
I hate it. Which came out later, “stretch”, “Woody”, “Jessie”? It’s so annoying to have to look that up.
Which came later, Windows XP, ME, or Vista? Sure, you probably have that memorized, but if you didn’t it wouldn’t be immediately obvious. That’s just a problem with using codenames instead of numbers, nothing to do with unserious names. At least Debian releases have reasonable version numbers alongside the codenames, unlike some other operating systems!
Similarly, VLC names their releases after Discworld characters. It’s a fun way to make major versions feel like more than just a number increment.
The Vorbis audio codec was also named after Vorbis from Small Gods, the 13th Discworld book.
That’s contested but still very cool (and the people who disagree are wrong)
How many years until they run out of characters?
Oh they should definitely choose Rocky as name for the next Debian release.
And if they ever run out of Toy Story characters, the Marvel universe has thousands of other characters…
Not to mention other Pixar film characters.
Unstable branch is always Sid, 'cause he’s so unstable. They just changed experimental to rc-buggy.
I know you named Sid, but it’s a rolling release so it never gets a new name.
unfortunately there’s no rhyme or reason to the naming. which came first: bookworm, buster, or bullseye? They should just use numbers.
I actually like Mint’s naming scheme, of alphabetical women’s names that end in an a sound. Only one problem: They decided to go with the minor upgrade cycle during Mint 17. The 17th letter is Q. I’m frankly surprised they were even able to think of “Quiana.” That’s why the rest of the 17s were R names, Rafaela, Rebecca etc. so now they’re off by one.
You can use version numbers, but it’s on you to change them when new point releases drop.
Numbers give the wrong impression that one version follows another. Debian release channels exit alongside each other individually. Giving the release channels names helps to make that distinction. It also makes for an easy layout of packages in APT repositories.
Sid is and always has been Sid. If you were to assign numbers, what number should replace that name? There are perfectly working labels for release channels and there is no reasonable replacement.
