Geeko

The chameleon came before the name. SUSE co-founder Hubert Mantel has said he asked a friend who studied art to draw something for the company, and she came back with a chameleon, which is a neat fit for a Linux distribution built on adapting to whatever hardware you throw at it. The thing had no name for years. In early 2000 SUSE ran a four week name-the-mascot contest that pulled in more than two thousand suggestions and picked Geeko, a squash of gecko and geek, decided the open source way, which SUSE still brings up on its anniversary. As a piece of design it is genuinely excellent: one continuous green form, a spiral tail, one eye you can read at sixteen pixels, essentially unchanged since openSUSE launched in 2005 and only lightly tweaked in 2007. As a character it is almost nothing. There is no backstory, no voice, no world. The plush is the only version with a body, which is why SUSE's biggest Geeko campaign, in 2014, was a hashtag asking people to photograph the toy in front of landmarks. In 2023 openSUSE ran a full community logo contest to separate its identity from SUSE's trademark, and the chameleon is still sitting in the official artwork repo, which tells you something about how hard a good silhouette is to replace.