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Comment by zilkoopsie | Hacker News Reader

This name is conversationally awful. Previously one could trivially identify CoreOS as a linux distro to someone. Now what are they supposed to say? container linux? it sounds like someone misspoke, what is it you're saying? you use containers and linux?

There's absolutely nothing distinctly identifying in the new name, nothing distinguishing it from other words expected in the relevant topic of conversation.

And pointing out that keeping its name all lower-case is to be consistent with the rest of CoreOS projects is a bit weak when clearly everything else has a succinct and short identifying name then this black sheep ambiguous mouthful of "container linux" shows up. Come on guys!

And what is up with this new logo, what does it even attempt to represent? Clearly Tectonic is the new shiny and this didn't receive much thought or investment.

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I absolutely agree, and generally prefer descriptive names over the silicon valley marketing focus group vomit the typical company name is these days.

That said, CoreOS was perfect. A name that is both largely descriptive, short, and doesn't pigeonhole the product into one static market segment during it's lifetime.

This? I will refuse to even bring it up in executive strategy meetings since it's such a horribly confusing name that will just cloud the subject being discussed in explaining what I meant.

Certainly a minor thing, but definitely a minor step backwards not forwards.

Definitely backwards. Usually companies with successful products adopt the product name as the new company name, like dotCloud to Docker or 37signals to Basecamp.

> This name is conversationally awful.

It's also entirely un-Googleable. Searching "CoreOS" would return you stuff only about CoreOS. Searching "container linux" will return you tons of other unrelated results, if you don't get carpel tunnel by the time you even finish typing it.

For me, at least, it's returning mostly links about LXC, which seems appropriate. As you mention, probably not good for the CoreOS brand.

it's also pretty new, I'd come back and run the query in a few months

However, the inverse is probably what CoreOS is going for.

Now, whenever you google "linux container" you'll get "container linux by coreOS" as one of the top hits (currently, for myself, googling "linux container" doesn't have coreOS on the first page).

That would be a good point as a question but as an idea it's naive. Unless they increase their popularity by several times they never displace any of the current top search results.

CoreOS is fairly popular isn't it?

> Now what are they supposed to say? container linux? it sounds like someone misspoke, what is it you're saying? you use containers and linux?

On the bright side, Docker has been trying to "own" the term container for quite a while, all to the point that people don't even know that other kinds of containers even exist.

This might open up people to the idea that a container is a concept, and that there are multiple implementations out there, and not just Docker.

I've honestly only thought of containers as related to Docker. They definitely appear to be pushing to "own" the term as you said. Anyway, yeah, really bad name. CoreOS was a wonderful distro name that hinted at its overall purpose/function.

> Now what are they supposed to say? container linux? it sounds like someone misspoke, what is it you're saying?

It is confusing.

"We should use Container Linux."

"No, you mean lxc, it's used for containers on linux."

... :(

>This name is conversationally awful.

This!

What are the follow on products? "Relational Database", "Distributed Cache" ?

Folks said the same thing when Red Hat became RHEL. I remember because I was one of them both times. That being said these things blow over and while you specifically get it, I can tell you first hand that many people do not and get REALLY confused.

The thing that changed was only the insertion of the word "enterprise." (Red Hat Linux -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux) The company name (which is a fanciful mark)'s inclusion as a prefix of the product name did not change.

Here, the company's name is no longer included in the product's name. If they'd called it "CoreOS Container Linux," then that would be a different story.

Also makes the name of the company suddenly meaningless in a kind of silly way.

ContainerOS would have been a good compromise.

Or hey, CoreLinux by CoreOS.

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