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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for asking, but am I right that this project has no relation whatsoever with the well-established Cairo library, which has been around for almost 20 years?

https://www.cairographics.org/

If so, it would be a pretty terrible choice of name for a project with a focus on something that's visual (an alternative Windows desktop), given that cairolib is a graphics lib. I, for one, have been rather confused.

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I think the project's name is referring to the unreleased "predecessor" of Windows 95, which existed quite a few years before that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)

would make sense, but the two look quiet different?

Would make more sense to call it LONGHORN then by this association.

Well seeing as a longhorn is a form of gnu, maybe they should call it that. Shorter.

Like the distributed block storage solution for Kubernetes?

Ok, zoomer.

I was also very confused, I thought this was a new desktop environment rendered with the Cairo library. It is a poor choice of name.

There was also a dock named cairo-dock that could be used as a desktop environment in the free desktop world.

http://www.glx-dock.org/

Besides the graphic library, the Windows codename and the dock, there's also a somewhat odd exotic programming language - https://www.cairo-lang.org/

How about not choosing a project name in relation to a well-established city in egypt? /s

Like the space for project names is pretty much overloaded multiple times already. Unless we start to use funny words of the dictionary like 'carbuncle'.

10-15 years ago, funny made up names were all the rage for startups.

Nowadays you just take any remotely related word and add "ly" or "ify" at the end. Much more consistent!

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