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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

I'm a KDE long time user and contributor, and i agree with the GP's comment.

Apple does it more sparingly (now), and fairly consistently: as a product line evolved. The iMac line did it when it was "cool", the iPod was the next one, and the iPhone evolved from the iPod so it made a lot of sense (and thus so did iOS). There's not really anything else Apple names this way. Apple TV, Macbook, Airpods, Safari... Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous. It's also not a particularly "pretty" letter and you end up with names that are either purposeful misspellings, midKapitalized, are plain bad puns, or occasionally and at best, are merely oKay.

KDE does not have a great brand. Apple does.

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Currently Apple also has iPad, iCloud, iLife, iTunes, iMessage, iMovie, and iWork. Formerly, Apple had iDVD, iPhoto, iTools, iWeb, and iSight.

It might also be interesting to note that Apple licenses iOS from Cisco [0].

[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_io...

They also have MacBook Pro, Mac mini, Mac Pro, AppleTV (+), AirPods (Pro, Max), HomePod, Pencil, Watch, HomeKit, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, Smart Keyboard.

Also, Apple no longer has iLife or iTunes, and "iWork" is no longer a bundle, but even if it was, its apps are Pages, Keynote and Numbers. No "i"s there.

They use the "i" prefix more sparingly now, as the original post said.

iBooks is now Books too.

That sounds exactly like it was used sparingly: Apple have a lot more than 12 products.

I've never heard of iLife, iTools, iWeb, iWork or iSight so its use in flagship products is even more sensibly sparing.

iTunes has been replaced by Apple Music, and possibly iMovie too???

It's also worth noting Apple has been somewhat mocked got their overuse of i. Despite the sparing use. So KDE tacking it onto everything is even less sensible in this context.

I think the K naming has probably hampered adoption of KDE products in the long term: I was always resistant to install K* apps when I was using a non-KDE desktop due to compatibility paranoia, something I tended not to even consider when installing gnome/gtk apps for example (which tend mostly not to be prefixed with g or gtk- or similar)

> That sounds exactly like it was used sparingly [...] iTunes has been replaced [...] , and possibly iMovie too

The i-branding was very, very effective. Apple was one of the very few brands that really managed to "own" the internet in the mind of the average consumer. Which is one of the reasons it was wildly successful.

The new branding, in comparison, is meh. They now just leverage "Apple". Nothing else, because they think they are too good. Creating new brands is difficult and risky, so they just don't do it because "we don't need it".

It's a sign of decadence, and you can see it in the history of all corporate behemoths. Once Microsoft became huge, everything became "Microsoft This" or "Windows That" - they stopped making bets, and just leveraged their established brands. The rebirth was a fountain of fresh brands: Azure, Surface, Office365.

"Apple Music" and "Apple TV" are one of the many symptoms of a culturally-dying corporation. Like Microsoft, they will continue to be fabulously rich for decades, maybe score the occasional win like the move to ARM. But the new booms will come from elsewhere.

You're right but I think this is somewhat off-topic in this thread, as the alternative to the "decadence" and conservative nature of modern Apple would not be to continue using i*; it would would be to innovate in some new & different branding direction.

Neither is what KDE are doing with their persistent k* prefix: it's not decadent nor innovative. It's just stagnant.

> Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous.

Not really. The main desktop/interface, i.e. that users spend most time looking at, is called Plasma. The file manager, another high-usage application, is called Dolphin. The theme is Oxygen/Breeze.

Claiming 'everything has got to have a K' is about a decade out of date. Sure there are still things like KClock, KRunner, KWin, etc. but they mostly seem to be very old projects, from back when 'everything has got to have a K'. Others, like Konqueror, Kontact, etc. seem like pretty reasonable names.

>everything has got to have a K

No longer true. But nobody wants to rename well known apps like Konsole to Terminal , Kate to "Text Editor".

The i originally stood for "internet" when it was a new thing for the home user. The K in KDE stands for nothing in particular.

The K stands for kool!

> The K was originally suggested to stand for "Kool", but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular.

According to Wikipedia, however there is no citation.

Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE, called it that in this post:

https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Ia...

I don't mind it. If I see something with a surprise K at the front or somewhere in it, I can assume it's a KDE product and I know where to go for support. Maybe it's annoying to everybody else but this branding makes my life simpler.

Can't really grasp why an open-source project would need a great brand in the first place.

The one thing that keeps me in the *nix universe is the ability to pick and choose my desired software (and hardware ofc) without being influenced by iMarketing. I really dont care if KDE has a poor brand as long as it does its job well.

A good product without a good brand is almost useless. Good products have died because they failed to get enough attention.

In this case. The more users and interest in KDE/Plasma, the better for the whole environment and the developers.

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