Request: better override functionality in locale settings

[Matthew Ruffalo]

On 08/27/2014 01:16 PM, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 August 2014 11:34:52 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
>>> In my opinion, this is a very serious usability regression and would
>>> stop me from using Plasma 5. Are there any plans to change the
>>> behavior/appearance of this settings applet?
>> I don't know what it is, but anytime someome doesn't like something, it's
>> "usability" all of a sudden. Usability has a strict meaning, and translating
>> it to "I don't use it, but I don't like it, so it's bad usability" isn't
>> very useful.
>>
>> I understand that it changes you way you set up your system, of course.
> Actually, while the fact that choosing formats and units by locale instead of 
> directly isn't necessarily a usability problem, presenting all locales in a 
> single drop-down _is_ .
> See also the HIG for drop-down lists [1] which says "For a single selection 
> out of a large number of items (n>20), use a list view". This is because, as 
> Matthew stated, scrolling through a huge list inside a drop-down is very very 
> cumbersome.
> I've just filed a bug about this issue [1]. 
>
> The above being said, I do understand that people who e.g. prefer the metric 
> system though they live in a region that uses the imperial system by default 
> might find it unnecessarily intricate to find out which region uses their 
> preferred system first.
> The benefits of using the POSIX-compliant locale system instead of custom 
> formats selection still outweigh the costs from my point of view, but maybe we 
> can find a way for people to make it easier for them to switch to common 
> formats?
> Could we maybe put a hint somewhere that e.g. en_DK might give people what 
> they need at least for the date and time formats?
>
> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338599
Thank you all for the replies (though I picked the most recent message
to reply to). I will submit requests like this to the bug tracker in the
future. Until sending this message I didn't realize that this mailing
list is mostly used for patch reviews, and thought it might be a better
discussion medium than a bug tracker.

Thank you for your comments about the clock applet, Martin -- I'm
perfectly happy with the digital clock applet not having a separate
setting for 12/24 hour time. I *want* to set this globally.

I did specifically mean the huge drop-down of locales as something
that's definitely a usability problem instead of a matter of opinion.

I still strongly, *strongly* disagree that it's acceptable for a user to
choose an appropriate locale for override settings. I would also
strongly disagree that it's a huge step forward for the majority of
users. Most users, I would think, are happy with their regional settings
and don't want to use any overrides at all. The rest of us would like to
have options for *what formats to use* instead of *which region of the
world I would like to mimic for each setting*. I assert that setting an
override locale instead of an override format is very counterintuitive,
and I would even say "nonsensical". Most other systems allow setting
specific formats: Windows (back to at least Windows 98), Mac OS X, KDE
4, and even GNOME 3. As far as I know the GNOME developers originally
took the similar stance of "set a different locale if you don't like the
format for the one you're in", but restored date/time format overrides
after strong negative feedback from lots of users. I also find it very
informative that Microsoft and Apple both 1) paid engineers to implement
this functionality in the first place, and 2) continuously spend
engineering resources to maintain this functionality in newer versions
of their operating systems.

I obviously don't deal with the technical costs of supporting these
settings, and I fully appreciate how much cleaner the implementation
must be to have simplified locale settings. This type of
configurability, though, is exactly why I use KDE in the first place. I
distinctly remember trying out early versions of GNOME 3 and finding it
very bizarre that there was no simple option for a 24-hour clock or
YYYY-MM-DD date format, and that cemented my decision to stick with KDE
through the very early (and rough) 4.x releases.

Now if only I knew of a straightforward way to have the date/time
formats also affect GTK apps :) I use Thunderbird due to inertia, both
for mail and to read this mailing list over NNTP, and I've never taken
the time to figure out how to adjust its date and time formats. So many
horrible 12-hour times and middle-endian dates.

Thank you again, and more kudos for the great work with Plasma 5.

MMR...