Disclaimer: I am not a native speaker, maybe my perception of English words is skewed.
To me the word “tracker” in combination with computers has very negative connotations, be it browsers promising to do anything they can to “block trackers” or news about big tech secretly GPS tracking any device they can call home from. Thus, I always found it a bit odd that there is this process called “tracker” on GNU/Linux systems and I have witnessed other people being equally confused on their first encounter.
Of course an average user should never get in contact with the process name, but just like 'Task Manager" probably is a very popular app under Windows, Linux users will sometimes try to find out what is wrong with their system. And if they make their way to a process list, finding a “tracker” process might at least cause some confusion (especially should it be currently running and taking up lots of CPU cycles). Having another process called “tracker-miner” is not great either, if one knows of crypto mining.
I am curious if other people agree, so here is a poll. Feel free to put name suggestions in the comments.
Do you think “tracker” could use a different name?
- Yes
- No