Finally. Single click to open a file/directory is the first feature that I disable on a fresh system.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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I personally much prefer single click but I guess as a default double click is good since it's like that on most systems
Personally, I disable it first thing after installing and I think it's easier this way for those who come from Windows. Those who still prefer the single click, can easily enable it again. Not a big deal.
More like for anybody coming from Windows, Mac or 90% of other DEs
My parents found single-click behavior less confusing. It's how everything works on their phones and in web browsers.
Yeah. I also found it massively helpful to tell grandparents to just click on things. Instead of 3 times a day teaching them about the differences between everything and if they want a single left click, a double-click or a right click. And that a double right-click wouldn't do anything useful at all.
Fun times :-D
My dad (early 60s) double-clicks web links as if they were folders. I stopped groaning ages ago lol
Plasma 6 is really shaping up to be quite a nice overhaul of the system.
These are awesome changes. Thank goodness I have one less thing to change on any given install.
How are you even supposed to select files and folders in single-click? The tiny little + box that's very easy to miss?
I usually drag a selection. It kind of rare that I want to select a single file and just select it and not go ahead and simultaneously open a context menu with the right mouse button.
There is a + over the top left corner of the icon that you can click for selection without opening. Pretty easy to use if you get the hang of it.
edit: Or you just click the right mouse button over the file you want to select.
Even on windows I mostly do ctrl + left click. If I'm selecting files I'm most likely going to copy/cut/paste them, so I'm most likely going to have my other hand on the keyboard anyway
Guess enough Windows users are coming over and they're getting confused/frustrated by the old mouse click behavior.
Is this an historical thing? I was really confused when I started using KDE.
I don't believe so. In KDE3 it was double click IIRC then it changed with the single click during the web mania UI when people suddenly wanted the big unification for everything: phones, fridges, tablets, supercomputers.
Like a lot of other people mention, this is the first thing I flip in plasma too. A mouse with a pointer is just different from a tactile interface.
I personally don't remember it being that way but it's been a long time since I've used KDE. Like, Mandrake was still a thing when I last used it.
Partially, sure, but there's also a lot of KDE devs that are really convinced that it's objectively superior and wanted the default to convince more people to use it.
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Honestly, if that is the case, kudos to them. No DE should work against the user, and that doesn't mean the DE is dumbed down.
I get why they're doing it, so it's not a big deal for me as long as I can still use single click to open folders.
That being said, double click always seemed like a weird "hack" to use what is essentially the main function of the left click, no? As in, the primary thing I want to do when left clicking something is to go to that thing. Go to that folder, go to that link and go to (open) that application. "Selecting" is not the main action I use so I've always felt weird when "selecting" gets what is essentially the main function of the mouse, the left click.
I am on the opposite side. Selection feels absolutely like the primary function, with opening a thing being secondary. If nothing else, because it's super easy to click the wrong thing and I don't want to be punished for it. Also, I want to review my options before deciding what to click, and selecting them first helps me stay focused on one thing at a time for a moment. I also often select text I'm reading in a webpage. Helps my reading comprehension
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 OpenSuse~~ are double click by default
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 🤷.
Oh Noooooooo! Why change a sane default? It is like.... we (the developed world) also don't change back to measuring distances with our arms and legs just to cater for american people and just because there are a lot of them... Or our body weight in stones.
What's next? Changing LibreOffice's file format every few years and make it impossible to gather sane log data and fix your issues yourself, so that it feels more like 'home' for the windows users?
The minimum screen brightness is now always 1, and the minimum keyboard brightness is now always 0, ensuring that the screen backlight never turns off completely at minimum brightness, while the keyboard backlight always does
That's cool, but is it still possible to easily switch off the screen? For laptops, that's useful from time to time, when you don't want to close the lid and lock it, but you're waiting for a long running operation or just listening to music, and want to save battery power.
I think the best way would be that when long pressing the brightness lowering key, it stops lowering it at 1% as with this change, but pressing it once more would make it 0.
Also, I wasn't able to keep up with recent changes. Does anyone know if it's possible now to customize the rounded corners of windows and panels?
Laptops usually have a dedicated key to turn off the screen, no?
You mean the external display toggle? Because otherwise, no.
Mine doesn't, but even if it would have, most of the original special keys don't work in Linux. It's quite annoying because I don't have F keys and Home-PageUp and such, they were accessible with key combinations with the original OS.
On most laptops that do that, there's a BIOS setting that fixes it, the F keys at least. On HP's, you can set whether you want the top row to act as F keys or "media" keys. Any combo that uses the Fn key should work in Linux, and you can set your own hot-keys/shortcuts in Linux as well.
Btw, for those who think it's natural to select things by left clicking on them, try pressing space in dolphin to activate the "selection mode".