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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

As stupid as it sounds, I really think the name has a lot to do with it.

Linus (of Linus media group, not Torvalds) thought it was a meme distro.

The name predates the meme

Linus of LTT is an ascended videogamer. His knowledge ends just past overclocking your watercooled setup to get 2 more FPS out of the latest videogame. He's sometimes entertaining but never informative.

This. Linus knowledge with technical details is very shallow at best. Most of his videos have scripts pre-written and double checked by more knowledgeable members of his teams.

His jokes are not even that funny. The amount of followers he has is insane.

There are only so maany ways you can overclock/mod a build or "accidentally" drop expensive computer parts.

But he is still more likely to have known about fedora than the average "casually tech literate" user , yet he still associated the name to the meme. Compare the name "fedora" to "pop_os" and it becomes clear which one sounds more "normie friendly".

I disagree with you on Linus though. He is still a very reliable source when it comes to product reviews, and his channel is informative when it comes to which part to pick. He realizes that the channel is not very technical, which is why he is investing heavily into equipping and staffing his new test lab.

GIMP has the same problem. I recommended it to someone, and the first minute or two they thought I was joking until they said ‘wow, you are right, it actually has the fetish name’.

I know there was a push to have GIMP renamed GLIMP, but it went nowhere because “people shouldn’t be snowflakes lol”.

Yeah names in FOSS are so self defeating sometimes. It might sound superficial to the more practical/technical people who are usually behind those projects... but it has a huge impact! It is starting to get better, and the era of naming everything after weird obscure inside joke acronyms seems to be behind us.

(I get that we need to keep software fun, but you can have a lot of fun with nice names too!)

With other devs I refer to it as GIMP, but sometimes in mixed company (management present) I'll call it "GNU IMP". Just partially expand the acronym.

Gimp as a name still makes me laugh after all these years, whenever I actively think about it. You'd be hard pressed to find a worse name for your software. not only is it a fetish term, it's simultaneously also a slur against disabled people

English is not my first language.

I didn't know what gimp meant, or that it even meant something. Never gave a thought about it before.

TIL what it means. Expanded my vocabulary. Thanks buddy!

I can now never not think about it whenever I hear gimp.

Yeah, unfortunately, it got the name Fedora a few years before that hat style became closely associated with psychosexual toxicity.

WHAT?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fedora-shaming

> psychosexual toxicity

The Fedora hat (actually the Trilby hat) usually is associated with socially inept neckbeards. No need to use such strong words, even though it might describe some of them. Not all neckbeards are incels.

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