I love the K thing [LWN.net]

I love the K thing

Posted Sep 28, 2012 23:11 UTC (Fri) by blackbelt_jones (guest, #62623)
In reply to: wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator by sjj
Parent article: wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

I don't expect the name of an application to entertain me. I expect the name of an application to it tell me what it is, as succinctly as possible. I know it seems korny, but I think the k prefix is genius, because of its economy. It identifies an application as being part of KDE, often without making the application name longer, not by a single character. The KDE terminal emulator in konsole. Easy Peasy.

This is yet another thing I hate about Gnome. What's the name of the terminal emulator in gnome? "Gnome-terminal". There are a whole lot of other apps that begin with "gnome-", so if I'm trying to open the application with the run command dialogue, I have to type 7 characters before I have any hope of identification for successful completion.

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I love the K thing

Posted Sep 30, 2012 7:17 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Single letter prefixes like 'k' also show some humility: these applications don't assume everyone is using KDE (or else)

I love the K thing

Posted Oct 1, 2012 14:14 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

It's great, but tell me what part of KDE is kthreadd from? I don't use it and I wish to terminate this application.

But seriously, names mean what people want them to mean. A thing's names does not represent it's function, its function represents its name.

> There are a whole lot of other apps that begin with "gnome-", so if I'm trying to open the application with the run command dialogue, I have to type 7 characters before I have any hope of identification for successful completion.

But on the plus side, I can list all GNOME apps by typing gnome-[tab][tab], except for the ones that don't follow the convention. If it were applied universally the {gnome-,g,k} prefix would be much more useful, but it's inconsistent and you still have to guess.

I love the K thing

Posted Oct 2, 2012 10:22 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

> great, but tell me what part of KDE is kthreadd from?

That's from the kernel, not kde...

http://www.linuxvox.com/2012/06/what-is-the-kthreadd-proc...

I love the K thing

Posted Oct 2, 2012 10:59 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It seems to me that sorpigal (a) is perfectly aware of this (b) is raising a valid point regarding the overloading of the single-letter prefix 'k'.

I love the K thing

Posted Oct 2, 2012 4:07 UTC (Tue) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link]

Like, for example, kthreadd, khelper, and many others? This occasionally would have bitten me when I was trying to get rid of all jobs related to KDE. The main distinction is the permissions needed to kill these jobs.

Now, who was first, KDE or Kernel?

I love the K thing

Posted Oct 2, 2012 4:11 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Kill them all and the init sort 'em out!