Begging open source projects to stop with the libre<name> convention, it's awkward to say, it's cringe and seems to spiritually doom a project to fail.
The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meanings, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".
I just wish more of these projects would be a bit more ambitious and put more focus in their communication on being good at what they do, rather than being free and made by idealists. They're branding themselves in a way that only really appeals to other techy idealists, while accidentally putting off a lot of potential users who are neither technical nor philosophical enough to know or care what a term like libre means. There's a lot of good, free software that is selling itself short by communicating more about being the latter than the former.
I think there's some truth to what you say - at the same time, a lot of successful products have names that basically have no meaning at all, or at least none that's related to what the project actually does ("Windows", "Cursor", "Firefox", etc...)
Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...
"Windows" actually is related to what it does. As you might already know, before Windows, you just had DOS, which was 100% full screen all the time. Then Windows came along an let you run DOS programs (and Windows programs, of course) inside of their own windows, and let you have multiple windows open at once. Then, only after that was hugely successful, it became its own standalone OS. So at least at the time it was created and became popular, its name was very related to what it did.
The most succesful open source projects (firefox, blender, linux, krita,..) do not have libre in their name, the most famous of those who have is probably libreoffice, but it is not exactly loved.
So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..
You're not wrong but neither IMO is the person you're responding to. emacs wasn't renamed LibrEmacs. gcc wasn't renamed Librecc. "Libre" can both be trying to convey something, and an arguably a bad name that turn lots of people off.
One example that really sticks in my mind was "Libreboot". Yes, it's supposed to represent a free BIOS/booting system. But it also sounds like the name of a library dedicated to rebooting your computer.
I kind of agree. When nothing's Libre, naming your project Libre<something> is fine, I believe. But imagine OSS succeeds, and everything is named Libre<something>. Then that's terrible.
"Did you open libreterminal and use librels and libreget to download librebrowser to open libresearch?"
It lacks identity (just a little bit is fine) and distinctiveness, imo.
I speak two languages (English and Russian) and have never found their name to be awkward. This is the first time, actually, that I've seen somebody say they don't like their name.
Curious on what languages have a hard time saying Libre.
Every latin-derived language (which are most of the western languages) can pronounce it naturally, and even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood (even though they're incapable of pronouncing the non-retroflex `r`).
The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo.
"This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch where both a Francophone (Gavin Crawford impersonating Chantal Hebert) and an Anglo (I forget who) were stumbling over proper nouns from the opposite language. The joke was that both were trying too hard to pronounce things "properly". It came off as inauthentic and awkward.
