<table><tr><td style="">ngraham added a comment.
</td><a style="text-decoration: none; padding: 4px 8px; margin: 0 8px 8px; float: right; color: #464C5C; font-weight: bold; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F9; background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom,#fff,#f1f0f1); display: inline-block; border: 1px solid rgba(71,87,120,.2);" href="https://phabricator.kde.org/D29501">View Revision</a></tr></table><br /><div><div><blockquote style="border-left: 3px solid #8C98B8;
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<div style="font-style: normal;
padding-bottom: 4px;">In <a href="https://phabricator.kde.org/D29501#665639" style="background-color: #e7e7e7;
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color: rgb(107, 116, 140);"><p>If user data would show low vertical panel usage, what are we really fixing and for who? Extrapolating from that and presuming that a fair share of them are content with the current default, why do we go against that? And if it's just a matter of not touching defaults, can you guarantee users are going to be equally content with a left panel as a default?</p></div>
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<p>Design of software and its default settings is hard because you have to anticipate people's needs, not ask them what they want (they don't know what they want or their ideas are bad) or reflect what they've already done (most people don't know what's possible).</p>
<p>Most users never change more than a small handful of default settings, if any. This is practically a universal constant that is borne out by data wherever it is collected. So the fraction of users who have changed a default setting is rarely a useful metric for determining whether the default setting is a good one or not, because even if something is a bad default, most people will still not have changed it. The only case where this kind of data can be useful if the it shows that, say, 50% of users have changed a default setting--this means that it's so catastrophically bad that the system managed to overcome the inability or disinterest of most people in changing default settings because it was so bad that they went out of their way to seek help in changing it. At that point changing the default setting in the next release becomes a pants-on-fire emergency to prevent all of these irritated people from leaving your platform (if they can) or trashing it in their communications with others (if they can't).</p>
<blockquote style="border-left: 3px solid #a7b5bf; color: #464c5c; font-style: italic; margin: 4px 0 12px 0; padding: 4px 12px; background-color: #f8f9fc;"><p>It seems to me this would boil down to touch usage. (My hunch is most people don't care too much about saving some vertical pixels). We're still only talking about a smaller subset of users, who we could equally benefit by finishing <a href="https://phabricator.kde.org/D27845" style="background-color: #e7e7e7;
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<p>Not sure I understand the risks involved in this patch. Can you explain?</p></div></div><br /><div><strong>REPOSITORY</strong><div><div>R119 Plasma Desktop</div></div></div><br /><div><strong>REVISION DETAIL</strong><div><a href="https://phabricator.kde.org/D29501">https://phabricator.kde.org/D29501</a></div></div><br /><div><strong>To: </strong>ngraham, VDG, Plasma, filipf<br /><strong>Cc: </strong>davidedmundson, ahiemstra, broulik, filipf, plasma-devel, Orage, LeGast00n, The-Feren-OS-Dev, cblack, jraleigh, zachus, fbampaloukas, ragreen, ZrenBot, ngraham, himcesjf, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol, mart<br /></div>