Comment by schoen
17 hours ago
GNOME used to give software applications names of common nouns that were usually not strongly related to their function: Nautilus, Palimpsest, Totem, Tomboy, Seahorse. At some point I think they decided to move away from this because they found many users had a hard time remembering the names.
The way I remember it, GNOME moved away from funny release codenames all the way back around 2004 or 2005, and then gradually moved to application names reflecting their generic function (eg. gedit was for a long time called "Gnome Text Editor" in the .desktop file, basically hiding the component name in an about dialog, before another "gnome text editor" was introduced to replace it, but I haven't tracked this and maybe it's just a project rename too).
I do believe it is acceptable for software to have playful names. After all, that's how "googling", "tweeting" have entered the vocabulary (and no, nobody is "facebooking"). I am pretty sure global human population is not so dumb to not be able to learn to associate a non-function-reflecting name to its purpose. If anything, it's a marketing thing.
Is that rule number one or two in that naming things are hard?