On Friday 28 August 2026 15:14:21 Sebastião Guerra via tde-users wrote:
Since we are discovering how differently these names can sound in different languages, there is a funny one in Portuguese too. :-)
"Tristan" is traditionally "Tristão" in Portuguese (as in *Tristão e Isolda* ).
The problem — or perhaps just the amusing coincidence — is that to a modern Portuguese speaker, "Tristão" sounds very close to "triste" ("sad") plus the common augmentative ending "-ão". So it can jokingly sound like something along the lines of "very sad" or "big sad one".
So far we have Tristian sounding a little like "Christian" in English, Trina apparently not working very well in German, and Tristan becoming a rather sad bear in Portuguese. :-)
I suppose naming an international mascot is harder than it looks.
The links on wikipedia and wiktionary mention the curious etymology of the name, which combines an Welsh root, *drust*, meaning "noise", "tumult", with Welsh/Cornish/Breton *trist*, meaning sad, whence we get the meaning of sad in modern Romance languages, French, Portuguese, etc.
Nothing excites me like an excursion into etymology (seriously!) ... however, I doubt future users of TDE will dig the name, nor will they dig into its etymology.
I don't much care for the notion of a "sad" mascot, but it may be that he is sad because so few people know about the Trinity desktop, compared to some others out there, or sad because we can't get TDE into the official repositories for Debian, Devuan, Ubuntu, etc. Or he could be sad because most of the installation images (with TDE) do not work so well. (At least, that is my experience.)
In any case, I noticed that, but it's just a name.
I do think that it would be best to find a name that is equally male and female. Otherwise, we forget that roughly half of all living things are female, including human users of the Trinity desktop.
Cheers, Sebastião
Most important, I believe, is to stay with the *Tri-* stem for Trinity. The rest can be negotiated, but we ought to think like poets rather than as advertising and marketing people.
said Mike Bird via tde-users: | Would "Trix" work for TDE's mascot's name? | | "Trix" was previously used as the name of | one of the two mascots of UEFA 2008. | | It's also short and simple, like Linux "Tux".
Silly Bird: Trix is for kids.
I had actually thought of something like Trickster, which is not really a name, but a kind of title. But then I had second thoughts: not really catchy enough; maybe sounds a little too academic, whatever.
Perhaps Trix-something? (Trixter doesn't quite make it, though.)
After all, we can create our own new name. We don't have to be bound to the past, names that already exist.
Bill