Request: better override functionality in locale settings

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Wednesday, August 27, 2014 19:16:29 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_ .

Surely, and almost every bugreport has some relation to usability, that 
doesn't mean that anything someone runs into is "bad usability", I'm against 
conflating issues and muddening our terminology.

> 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]. 
> 
> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338599

We have 6 comboboxes which are all too big. This needs a serious design 
concept, we can't just replace them all with lists + filters, because people 
don't have 6000px height displays. 

I've posted the same comment to the bugreport, let's move this discussion over 
there.

> 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?

There's the Examples section which shows exactly what one can expect, whenever 
the combo value changes. Not good enough? Otherwise, I'm out of ideas (for 
now).
-- 
sebas

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