On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, Dan Rue wrote: > On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 01:45:15PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > >> We're talking here about someone who said he won't use Ubuntu because >> the name sounds silly to him. He might have been joking, but it didn't >> look like it to me. > > If names don't matter, why have you and us collectively spent so much > time arguing about our own namesake? > > http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/2008-October/055072.html It's not that names don't matter, and that's not what I said. It's that the name of a thing is nowhere near as important as what the thing is. Names like "Debian" or "Ubuntu" don't tell us much about the distro and so they shouldn't play much of a role in our choice of which to use. I'm talking about the sound of the name here. Peanut Linux is small, I think, so that's a good name that tells us something about the distro. If I thought the word "Debian" sounded silly, should I look for a different distro to use? The GNU/Linux v Linux controversy seems to be highly emotional. I think that GNU/Linux does a better job of describing the thing that you're getting when you install some GNU/Linux or Linux distro. GNU programs like "ls" (written by Richard M. Stallman and David MacKenzie) are hard to live without. That's why I think GNU/Linux is a better name than Linux, but I don't want to argue that point again. I wouldn't decide not to use any kind of software because the name sounded funny. I might not use a distro if the authors strongly opposed calling it a GNU/Linux distro, but that would be a political decision, not one based on the sound of a word. Mike