[nine_k]

Any well-known generic word is very likely to already have been used by a bunch of projects, some of them already prominent. By now, the best project name is a pronounceable but unique string, for ease of search engine use. Ironically, "systemd" is a good name in this regard, as are "runit" or even "s6".

[lrvick]

I use tiny init systems regularly in AWS Nitro Enclaves. Having the enclave and init system both named nitro is not ideal.

[nine_k]

Dinit, runit, tini -- all avoid the name clash :)

[Y_Y]

> Any well-known generic word is very likely to already have been used by a bunch of projects,

Are you sure? There are lots of words, and not so many projects that use words like these as their names.

Of the 118179 packages I see on this Ubuntu 18.04 system I can roughly roughly ask how many have names that are dictionary (wamerican) words:

  comm -12 <(apt-cache dumpavail | awk -F': ' '/^Package:/{sub(/^lib/,"",$2); print $2}') /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l

This gives 820 (or about 1000 if you allow uppercase). Not so scientific, but I think a reasonable starting point.

[entropie]

nitronit obviuously