Completely Unrelated Thought #1
Hacker is such an unfriendly word, tinkerer would be better. Futterer is perfect but only works in N.Ireland, so the closest I can think of that would work is “Fiddler”. People who fiddle with things, it sounds so much better than people who hack on things. A hack has too many bad connotations.
Completely Unrelated Thought #2
Everyones other favourite Desktop Environment is having a rebrand, and as Jos Poortvliet says “The K Desktop Environment is dead,” we now need a way to pronounce KDE. Like QT is pronounced “cute” (although I’ve never understood that, surely “cutie” makes more sense?). KDE seems like it should be pronounced “kiddie”, it just makes sense, and its friendly and suggests fun.
So are you suggesting a KDE hacker should be called a ‘kiddie fiddler’? Not sure if that will go down too well 🙂