[DanBC]

Fedora isn't for non technical family members. Here's a bit of mild whinging that's only relevant if you want to give it to non-technical people.

There's a move to give stuff generic names, rather than the obscure names they had in the past. For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files. When a non technical person needs to search for hep this new name makes it impossible for them to create a useful search term.

[files foo bar] is going to be different from [nautilus foo bar]. Frustratingly the old name works for searching, but it's not in any titlebars or about boxes or menu items, so the non-technical person has to just know that files is also sometimes called Nautilus.

Fedora 20 has an appstore. This has something like 4 different names - in the menu, in the title bar, in the about box, in the icon.

For what it is (a rapidly released testing distro) it's lovely - nice community (from what I could tell) and lots of activity.

[LeonidasXIV]

> There's a move to give stuff generic names

That's not so much a Fedora thing but a GNOME move, as the RPM containing "Files" is still called Nautilus.

Also, I am a bit surprised since it goes contrary to your argument, because when a user looks for a file explorer he's much more likely to find that looking for "Files" rather than the (rather strange, really) name of "Nautilus".

I would see myself as a technical user and yet I have no idea how the apps on my Android device are called. One is called generically "Gallery" and another one even worse, "E-Mail".

[toyg]

KDE historically worked around this problem by displaying a description as well as the name, e.g. something like "Nautilus - File explorer". It worked great.

Thing is, the move to generic names is basically an ego trip from Linux developers. Consistent products like Windows or OSX, which are monolithic and have bazillion of users with the exact same configuration, can get away with it; but the Linux world is a forest of different apps from random developers, haphazardly packaged by this or that distribution and continuously updated every few months. In this environment, thinking you can just refer to "Ubuntu files" or "Fedora files" is a pipe dream; often the solution to your problems will be on sources that are not specific to the distro you are actually using (see for example the Arch and Gentoo wikis).

[Avshalom]

Who is this user though? Apple has Finder, Microsoft: Explorer, Android/iOS: nothing, and unless they've installed the CLI/minimal edition of a linux distro it has a file manager and they launch it not by selecting the application from a menu but clicking on a folder icon.

Making the name basically irrelevant unless they need to ask a question about it in which case enter googlability.

[y4mi]

They are not exclusive though - there is nothing stopping them from calling it 'Nautilus Files' ^^

[okasaki]

> For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files.

It's a bad trend. It's really frustrating when you're trying to find out what the executable or package name is.

[Brakenshire]

I don't think there's that much wrong with "Gnome Files". That should be enough to search for help, and also gives information about what the program does. Similarly, I would say the names should be "Firefox Browser", "Geary Email" etc (if we're aiming to be user friendly).

[DanBC]

"Gnome Files" should be fine, if people know it's called "Gnome Files", and if people know to use "exact search".

In Fedora 20 the name "Gnome Files" was hard to discover (that may have changed in later Fedoras) and non technical people just don't know how to search.

[downtide]

I like the categorisation aswell as a name (and version).

In your desktop environment, 'Open web browser' (as an action), can be associated with whichever browser you prefer. And perhaps a context menu on that to choose between many.

I prefer something like: Gnome file manager: 'Nautilus', to the browser: 'Web'. How ghastly.

To differentiate between many, like both of Windows' web browsers: Edge and Internet Explorer. You could say Windows web browser Edge. Or Edge; Windows' web browser. Windows itself is a confusing name, but that's another conversation.

[sandGorgon]

so I just moved to Fedora 23 after 10 years on Ubuntu. It was something that I was very hesitant about, but Fedora 23 has totally smashed it out of the park.

I think the usability is miles ahead of Ubuntu atleast - I realize that is a personal opinion, but I love that Fedora is a tightly integrated Gnome (and soon Wayland distro).