this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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I like Kate as a program but man KDE need to change how some of their app names appear in Plasma.
A new user looking through their start menu and seeing "Kate" will have no idea it's a text editor/notepad. The same is true for multiple other programs.
Okular, Dolphin, Cantata... ask someone who's never tried Plasma before what those programs do and I'd wager you'd get an incorrect answer for each one.
There is actually an option to do that iirc. You can have it show entry descriptions.
Indeed. That's what I do on my Plasma system, it's a good option.
But a new user or someone who isn't technical won't see that, they don't go digging through settings in each app, they just use the defaults.
I guess a solid compromise would be to enable this by default, and anybody who doesn't like that short descriptor can disable it.
But IMO nothing will beat the no-nonsense straightforwardness of calling OS apps immediately intuitive names. This is something I believe Gnome gets right. Go onto their GitHub and their file manager is called Nautilus, but on your system it will default to being called "Files", because they know everyone will understand what "Files" is but a lot of people would ask "Wtf is Nautilus??", same goes for other apps, e.g. "Loupe" appearing as "Image Viewer".
What does "Excel" do? What does "Steam" do? What does "Balena" do? What does "Conky" do?
Programs that we think of as being part of the OS, such as the included text editor, is a very different thing to something like Steam, imo.
Steam isn't preinstalled on your PC, it's not a core part of your desktop OS. You download Steam yourself, so you'd only do it once you already know what it is.
Third party apps kinda need unique names and branding like that to distinguish themselves.
A newbie won't know what "Kate" or "Okular" do. They might know what "Dolphin" does because it has a folder as the app icon (although users of screen readers won't see that). They will probably know what "Notepad" or "Text Editor" does, though.
Kate isn't a part of the OS, though... the text editor that is a part of the OS is called "vi".