This week in KDE: Double-click by default
This week in KDE: Double-click by default
This was a week of huge changes and improvements, starting with our headliner! Yes it’s true, by default in Plasma 6, you’ll single-click to select files and folders, and double-click t…
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Big mistake in my opinion. Coming from Windows, it took me only one day to get comfortable with single click and now I don't want to miss it anymore.
I reckon they looked at their telemetry and chose the setting most people have which has the side effect of being more familiar to Windows refugees.
Telemetry wasn't a factor iirc. The biggest reasons for this change were that
- defaults like this (that only apply to new installations) should make life easy for newcomers, not for the existing users. Those users come from Windows, MacOS or other Linux DEs, which all use double click
- it already is the default in pretty much all popular distros. KUbuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, SteamOS
and I think also OpenSuseare double click by default
Luckily, openSUSE still has the default single click setting, and I am very thankful for that! (just my opinion, I would not have a problem with simply changing the setting should the default become different, don't get me wrong, I just like it better this way)
openSUSE defaults to single click. It's among the first things I change on a new install!
Meh. Telemetry should be the way to tell if it's really making it easier or worse for newcomers. Why collect telemetry at all if you're not going to use it anyways?
And if the distros are already having it as a default, it's even worse. We're setting it per default because it's set as the default.
Why collect telemetry at all if you're not going to use it anyways?
Because we're sadly not collecting enough and actually useful telemetry. I think we know from telemetry that a big majority has double click set, but we don't know why (default setting vs user chose it explicitly).
And we can't easily add such things without breaking user trust. We need a new telemetry system that's more useful and extendable, but doing that is a lot of effort that noone has put in yet.
And if the distros are already having it as a default, it's even worse. We're setting it per default because it's set as the default.
No, we're setting it as a default because a bunch of people that are closer to the users than us decided to deviate from the upstream default. That's a super clear sign that we're doing it wrong
Ah okay. I don't get to choose anyways, because I don't currently use KDE on my main desktop. But I'm one of the people who reverts all those settings first thing after install. It's just that it sometimes gets annoying once I need 20 minutes to configure my desktop environment and answer many questions about privacy telemetry and so on. And disable all the background stuff like updates on shutdown, the desktop search and whatever gets in the way all the times. At this point I could just use windows if that's what I like or use those 20mins to learn to configure some tiling window manager.
I was kind of okay the way it was in the olden days. You just got what the developers liked most. No telemetry involved. Often times that was quite alright. Some times they followed some design philosophy anyways (or just 'ripped off' the MacOS UX). But that also had downsides. And I get it that some people need their computers to do a specific job. And they don't want to learn lots of new concepts just to use their tool. Maybe a bit like when I sit in front of an Apple keyboard and can't find half of the keys. Maybe we shouldn't listen to what I like. Maybe we should have an onboarding dialogue that plainly asks you if you prefer UX concept A or B. I don't really know. But not for just this one thing.
You're 100% right with the last argument. If most of the distros or all of your users configure something a certain way. This should tell you something.
I just wanted to say, I like diversity. Not every UX has to look and feel exactly the same. And we don't always need to go for the lowest common denominator.
Maybe we should have an onboarding dialogue that plainly asks you if you prefer UX concept A or B. I don't really know. But not for just this one thing.
Yeah, something like that could be great - personalize the defaults for the person actually using the computer when it gets set up, instead of having only one set of defaults for the masses.
I've been a happy customer since 1.2. I even stuck with it through 4.0 which was a little traumatic 8) I like choice - lots of it and KDE delivers that in spades.
I mean, their telemetry is opt in and in most distros you don't even get asked if you want to help them with it. If anything, most people aren't even aware that Telemetry exists, if they haven't looked at the specific section in the settings menu.
I didn't say it was a large sample size, but it's all they have to base it on. Of course I could be completely wrong and the telemetry had nothing to do with it. But then, what's the point of the telemetry?
The sad truth is that telemetry is only unbiased when it is on by default and not opt-in (Not that I advocate for that). Don't know where I read it, but last month I saw an article about how Gnomes opt-in telemetry data showed that Fedora is the number one distro for Gnome users and Ubuntu was somewhere between 3rd or 4th place. That's obviously not true, but it was true for the people who activated the telemetry.
But back to the topic. As long as the KDE devs give me the choice to keep single click selection, I don't really care what the default is. A lot of people will never learn about it and miss out in my opinion, but whatever 🤷.