PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura | Hacker News Reader

PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura

nura.eco

188 pointsHotGarbage62 comments

Idk, I think the new name sounds too corporate, like some shitty startup or wellness brand. PostmarketOS was a bit of a mouthful but it gave you some idea of what the project was. Well, if they think it's a way to reach more people, then more power to them.

the first thing I thought of: https://www.nuvaring.com

The jokes almost write themselves about the knock-on effects of dedicating significant time to debugging your phone running this OS, with the new name.

I think they want to be a mobile OS, plain and simple. But the new name... Not good.

That’s what I like about it. It signals a kind of ambition open source projects usually lack.

Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.

Pfah, Poob. Zombo.com is the place to be. Welcome to Zombo.com. This is Zombo.com. Welcome. This is Zombo.com. Welcome to Zombo.com. You can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Xxy0tU65Y

im still so sour that the domain got sniped and now hosts some mockery of what used to be zombo.com.

I'm sorry, what? How exactly does this relate to PostmarketOS?

That the new name sounds like (at least to some people) a meaningless blob of letters, similar to what a bunch of tech companies name their products or themselves, I suppose.

Exactly

I did think postmarketOS was a bit of an awkward name but it was also widely recognised, at least in Linux nerd circles. I guess this will cause a bit of confusion in the short term but hopefully lead to broader recognition in the longer term. Though the obstacles to Nura's growth are probably not primarily branding-related.

Yeah, I was trying to think of a mnemonic to remember this new name but I'm coming up short. The old one was indeed... somehow 'post-market' isn't the best vibe so I do get the point of a rebrand in general

So the name comes from nuraghe, a kind of ancient stone tower in Sardinia, intending to convey stability and strength. But nura is already a Sardinian word, it seems, for "daughter-in-law". Daughters-in-law can be strong and stable too, of course, so it doesn't matter much.

Yeah the old name was not good so I get the desire to rebrand, although I'm not sure this is much better.

Searching for "Nura" returns dozens of existing results. They couldn't even get nura.org! Is there really not a more distinct name they could've picked? Even Nura OS would make them easier to find in the long term.

Non-exhaustive list of things already named "nura":

- NURA: Premium Ingredients for Food & Wellness

- Nura - Award-winning personalised sound

- NURA: India's First Ai Powered Health Screening Center

- Nura Clinics | Pain Management Specialists In Minnesota

- Nura (German rapper)

- NURA - Shop Now for Health Essentials

- Nura | Hummus, Falafel & Shawarma

- Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan

- Nura, a defunct consumer electronics company based in Melbourne

- Nura Space: Workplace Management Platform

Competing for this name seems like an uphill battle.

So, like Lineage. I still rock my CyanogenMod

As a daily-driver?

LineageOS is more distinctive

I'm torn; the old name was awkward, but renaming is a painful breaking change. Oh well, it's done now.

I kind of still prefers postmarketOS

I absolutely do, too. Even dropping the "OS" will still net a cool name.

Nura it also means "light bulb" in Hebrew (נורה).

Either way, I don't mind that much, I do think "Nura" is more catchy than "postmarketOS", it also rolls off the tongue much better IMO

I thought the old name was fine, it was usually just PMOS abbreviated... Nura seems totally unnecessary but we'll roll with it or some fork if someone creates an alternative

If you don't like the name just be happy the new logo isn't a butthole like so many.

This sucks. I like postmarketOS and I liked the old name. I even have the pmOS pinephone and the old t-shirt

I'd be so happy to install this on my phone. I miss the time when I was using Samsung Dex. Incredible to not hold my computer around anymore. But Samsung... not open-source, buggy.

Why don't you? No time like now.

Very few phones have good enough upstream Linux support to run Nura as a daily driver. It's an active area of research but getting something where you have a working camera, phone calls and reliable sleep/resume has become somewhat of a white whale.

I haven't checked in a while, but I've dabbled in Linux phones for years now so I'd be surprised if it changed that much since last I looked.

Hm. The name collides with Nura, an audio company with a product called Nuraphone. I suppose any pronounceable 4-letter word has collisions.

As someone who used PostmarketOS previously, and would be interested in returning...

1. Congrats to them on a name change.

2. Bummer about not getting the .org domain name, but if the current registrant hasn't been using the name, there is some ICANN trademark pressure that can help the registrant be reasonable with the price.

3. Is the effort into branding a sign that there's also imminent big news on viability for daily drivers?

Open source continues its streak of picking atrocious names. Just off the top of my head, in recent memory we have Raku, Kodi, Luanti, Valkey, and now Nura.

Naming things is famously hard, but sometimes it feels like the Good Idea Fairy visits these projects and they aren't product-savvy enough to realize that humans are social, fickle creatures. You need to pick a name that your users won't be embarassed to say in a board room. There is a fairly sizable body of research-backed evidence that picking a cringe name reduces initial trust/comprehension.

Lukewarm take: "I'm a Raku developer" makes one sound like someone with poor hygiene who watches far too much anime.

Edit: also “floorp” the Firefox fork and “xonaly” the search engine. Who could forget those gems.

Java. Fortran. C#, which in pronounced 'see sharp' despite being written with a number sign rather than a sharp. Algol.

Fortran gets a pass for being ancient and having a descriptive name (FORmula TRANslation)

C# is the sharp note above C, enharmonic with D flat in a tempered tuning.

No, it's not. C♯, with a sharp sign, is the sharp note. Exchanging the number sign for the sharp sign is like exchanging the Latin capital letter R for the Cyrillic capital letter Ya (Я).

Nura means nothing to me, PostmarketOS described what it is (OS), with a hint of what kind of OS it might be.

FYI: they don't accept AI contributions.

From experience, AI is a 10x (or more) booster for getting a new device up and running - or porting mainline Linux to those super old (3.x) kernel forks.

I'll not contribute back anymore - this is a real bummer, but I guess they made their choice.

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704503#49745309

https://docs.nura.eco/policies-and-processes/development/ai-...

Someone should do a fork that accepts ai assisted contributions, with a spin in the old name: postpostmarketos...

A pro-AI fork would be nice for both "sides"; we could experimentally see whether it helps or hurts. In a few months-years, we should be able to see whether it's faster/buggier/better/worse.

I've seen a few people react this way, promising to never contribute when AI is banned; invariably, it turns out they hadn't been contributing upstream anyways.

https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/denysvitali

https://gitlab.com/sm8250-mainline/linux/-/merge_requests/8

https://wiki.nura.eco/wiki/Special:Contributions/Denvit

https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/

So… a handful of patches for a single phone from like a couple years ago?

The contributions won’t be missed.

Can I see your contributions to the project?

People are more inclined to contribute when it's easy than when it's hard. What of it?

Contributing may be easier, but stopping the project becoming a harder-to-debug mess is more of a priority.

Good for them. AI (especially the way you're describing it) is nothing but cancer.

The policy you linked explains its reasoning pretty clearly. So you feel better about their decision, please re-read it with an open mind and a "why would a very ideologically-motivated copyleft free software project think this" attitude.

They'll come around, eventually.

Or get forked to irrelevance.

Can you give an example of a point in their rationale that they'll "come around" on, and why? I mentioned it because it looks solid to me.

I don't think they'll be forked to irrelevance. Even if I put aside my skepticism of the quality or longevity of AI-assisted projects, I don't think there's a bigger audience for a Nura that's less principled on the issues they mentioned.

Nura sounds like a medicine or a drug.

This is a mistake. The original name said exactly what the os was.

Significant improvement on the old name, it no longer sounds inherently obsolete when you say it.

Now they'll embark on their most difficult challenge yet, persuading me to remember that they changed the name.

The new name doesn't mean anything to anyone. It just sounds like yet another startup with a weird slop name.

The original name was descriptive and helpfully labelled.

I feel this was a bad decision.

I feel the same. Hopefully this feeling will change to something better. But at first sight, postmarketOS was way more powerful.

Was the original name some kind of nod to PostgreSQL?

No, the "postmarketOS" name came about to indicate that it's an OS to keep older devices working for longer (i.e. providing active support after the support from the manufacturer has ended).

Wow now that is an even worse name than “postmarketOS”. Congratulations.

logo still sucks

Nah, it is just right, nerdy, simple and not a blob of colors. It fits the project!

Seems totally fine to me

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