You have rebranded K-9 Mail (Librem Mail), Tusky (Librem Social) and Riot (Librem Chat) clients. Could you stop this? No offence, but since it’s just rebranding, it’s stupid. Why can’t you guide users to use whatever client they want? For email Thunderbird, Geary, Evolution, K-9 Mail, Fairmail, etc, for ActivityPub Tuba, Tusky, Fedilab and for Matrix Fractal, Element, FluffyChat.
And if you someday develop your own client(s), could you name (no Librem X names) and keep them universal? We have SMTP, IMAP, Matrix, ActivityPub, OpenVPN, WireGuard standards and we at open-source world follow them. We have no need for dedicated clients. Please do not try be like Google, Apple, etc.
If you fork or customize and rebrand server software, like you do with Smilodon, it’s totally fine. BUT we do not want dozens of dedicated apps (of course your apps like Librem Social also work with other services, but still) or unnecessary rebranded junk. I hope you understand.
Other than that, Librem One is something so, so wonderful! When you fix these, me, my family and maybe the company I work for (if you offer to companies) will order.
They obviously want to create something which feels the same on all platforms. You don’t want to tell a customer “use app x on platform A and app y on platform B”. It is just confusing.
They obviously want to create something which feels the same on all platforms. You don’t want to tell a customer “use app x on platform A and app y on platform B”. It is just confusing.
Brand recognition.
I know, but I think that’s just a stupid thought brought to us by marketers. It is a huge advantage for companies if the customer can be “locked” to their “platform”. Spotify’s customer doesn’t switch easily because it’s a hassle.
However, things can be different. Think about telecom operators, you can use the device you want to use the service. We have standards and the same could and should be the case elsewhere, such as Librem One services. I hope Purism supports this, this is an open-source way.
And please don’t use word “platform”. It’s a buzzword after all. It’s Big Tech’s desire to create walled gardens.
I meant platform as in OS, like Android and PureOS not referring to a service.
With Librem One you can also use the app and OS you want. They are still compatible. As with your telecom operator, you would not expect that their app has different names on iOS and Android just because the codebase is different.
I am an experienced Linux user (although I do way more FreeBSD these days). However, I’ve never used any derivative of GNOME before (KDE in the past, nowadays openbox), so the more generic names helped me find out what each installed application does - Camera, Terminal, Feeds. I’ve used Firefox+Thunderbird for decades now. My own mistake: I’ve never bothered experimenting anything new.
But I can see the point - for someone hoping to bring their current experience to the Librem 5, it can get confusing.
The generic names are not what OP was talking about. These names are official GNOME app names. And they are exactly meant to be there to directly show what an app does. Yes, there are also the technical names, like ‘Epiphany’ but those are not for end users.
Millipixels is somehow special: The camera is very WIP and I would more describe that app as an Proof of Concept (it’s a fork of Megapixels, not just rebrand). For some time now, the Snapshot app is there which will probably be integrated into the GNOME app ecosystem and then be renamed to just ‘Camera’. I did not hear a comment of some Purism dev but I could imagine, Snapshot will sometime replace Millipixels when the camera stack is more streamlined and ‘just works’.
I think any rebranding is completely valid. Only thing they should do in that case is creating a fork of the original software using their changed name but still pointing upstream. Any changes to that fork besides the rebranding could still get merged to improve the software.
Naming or branding certainly does not matter as much to FOSS development as people might think. In the end the only thing which matters is that contributions still get upstream, easily accessible for everyone.
Just keep in mind what Purism is trying to do. They market towards a very different audience which is used to an app ecosystem. FOSS certainly doesn’t look like that on paper when you are picking tools for your OS. Maybe the ones targeting the desktop environment look somewhat consistent but naming might still be off and the rest can sound very out of place.
CentOS had legal reasons for rebranding its recompile of RHEL. It is a good way to protect yourself. It also helps with not bugging the upstream developers when something is broken with the downstream changes. Uses should be filing bug reports with Purism first, not the upstream projects.
Still, platform term is technically quite inaccurate. And PureOS is not a platform, it is a runtime. Linux (Linux kernel, XDG, etc) is a platform in this context. PureOS, Fedora Linux, Flatpak, AppImage are all runtimes of the Linux platform, but as you can see platform is tricky in this point because nothing in the software world isn’t inherently well platform.
Indeed, you want to make it easy for those users who don’t want to have to choose an application, but you can do that with a simple “shell” application that dispatches to the approprite application. I.e. make a Librem application from where you can launch “the email program”, “the phone program”, …
The problem I have with rebranding is that it makes it harder to find documentation and help on that program since most of the info out there uses the real name. So if you want to rebrand, please do it in a “translucent” way that does not hide the real name of the application.
And they are exactly meant to be there to directly show what an app does. Yes, there are also the technical names, like ‘Epiphany’ but those are not for end users.