Why Are Operating System Version Names So Absurd? 460
jfruh writes "Apple's spent more than a decade on version 10 — or, rather, X — of its flagship operating system, with .x versions named after big cats (and many of them, it turns out, after the same big cats). Ubuntu Linux is scrambling to find ever more obscure animals to alliteratively name its versions after. And let's not even talk about Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1. Why is this area of software marketing so ridiculous?"
Because... (Score:4, Interesting)
Operating Systems are fundamentally boring. Once you get past the fanboi-ism, they are just software that sits there on your computer. They are there to *facilitate* your work, but they don't produce anything in and of themselves.
So you have to jazz them up as much as you can, so people will take notice.
I like Androids concept (Score:4, Interesting)
Easily Google-able (Score:2, Interesting)
Only speaking for Linux here,
But googling for generic issues often throws up heaps of out-of-date or otherwise unhelpful hits
For a set of systems that move so fast (eg. 6 monthly release cycles for Ubuntu and Fedora), you need to get more taylored results
Including "Quantal", "Wheezy" or "Spherical" in your search terms is likely to pull up far more relevant results
Re:talk about it on /.? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you type "/." in your address bar in Opera, it will take you to slashdot.
Re:And what's the deal with names anyway? (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it much easier to understand that CentOS 6.1 is a newer version than CentOS 6.0, for example, than trying to remember that "Killer Kangaroo" is newer than "Sloppy Sloth".
Well, you shouldn't try to remember that, since Ubuntu names in alphabetical order, just like Android. That will roll around in some half a dozen years, but Ubuntu also has YY.MM version numbers, so you know immediately that version 08.04 is over four years old. It's better than Debian where the name is not given alphabetically, but Debian also has a version number when you need it. Geeks make the OS. Geeks like the wacko names. Deal with it.