> "Google" isn't a verb, it's a brand name.
It's both. In my locale, it is the word people most often use to mean "search the web." Even the people I know who use other search engines like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia still refer to using these search engines as "Googling".
> Insisting on "application" instead of "app" is the equivalent of insisting on "cerchier" instead of "search":
No, it isn't (again, at least in my locale). Although, "app" is disproproportionately used to refer to non-free mobile applications, implied to be provided by a third party, with a slight connotation of being frivolous, both "application" and "app" are readily understood as terms for user-facing programs. As terms for searching the web, neither "search" nor "cerchier" is readily understood. If someone just says "search", it is unclear what they are talking about searching. One must specify "web search" or "search the web" to be reliably understood, which is a mouthful, leading most people to say "Google" instead. "Cerchier" is even worse. No one uses that term, so no one knows what it means.
> If you want new users to understand the purpose of the different parts of a new OS, it's probably best to use a term they're familiar with, which is the nearest equivalent to what is being described.
Can you point to a single example of a new Trisquel user being confused by the term "application"? I have never seen such confusion expressed in the forum, and every user I have personally introduced to Trisquel has immediately understood what "Add/Remove Applications" is for. The only reason you have given to use "app" instead is that mobile app stores tend to favor that abbreviation, and I don't consider that to be a good reason. The kinds of applications disproportinately referred to as "apps" are not "the nearest equivalent to what is being described".
> What it comes down to is whether the purpose of the Trisquel GUI is to help orientate new users, or to score obscure political points.
You make a lot of suggestions about how to present things to users. Are they based on observations of or feedback from real people? I apologize if this is an unfair assumption, but they don't seem to be. It's easy for intermediate-to-advanced users to develop an internal caricature of a "new user", and catering to this imaginary user can lead to nitpicking over unimportant details while overlooking the pain points real users actually have. I often ask friends to let me observe them testing a user interface or solicit feedback regarding their experiences with various programs and websites. I find that often the things I expected to bother them are not an issue, and that the problems are usually somewhere I wouldn't have thought to look.
In general, I think there is a tendency to overrate the importance of minor UI details. They can matter, but in helping people migrate to free software I find that the issues that get in the way are almost always either a missing feature or a deeply ingrained UX issue that can't be fixed with cosmetic tweaks. Since these problems are hard to solve, it is tempting to spend time discussing things that are less important but easier to understand. Beware of [bikeshedding][1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
