> Yes it’s true, by default in Plasma 6, you’ll single-click to select files and folders, and double-click to open them.
What was it before? I haven't used KDE since the Plasma debacle but I don't remember it getting something this basic wrong...
What was it before? I haven't used KDE since the Plasma debacle but I don't remember it getting something this basic wrong...
Despite the obvious vitriol of your message, I'd precise for the posterity that when KDE was created, this was not such a surprising thing to do as e.g. old Apple OS did so, and it was a commonly used option on other OSs.
Now as for the macOS cmd-tab behavior...
I'm not familiar with it. Can you elaborate?
> ... but I don't remember it getting something this basic wrong
1. It's only "wrong" because windows has been doing the double click way. In terms of accessibility, I'd argue double click is actually kinda bad, consider how people with joint issue may have trouble double clicking quick enough to register it. (Yes, you can adjust the speed, but this setting wouldn't even be needed if it's single click in the first place.) Imagine how annoying it would be if mobile device and <button/> all require double click/double tap, or even double-enter just to open a file.
2. Most of the Linux distro configured it into double click, anyway. Probably the reason why you don't remember it being a thing.
3. Steam Deck, on the other hand, only need single tap if you use touch screen.
Great thing about KDE (and others) is it's configurable.
I don't particularly care which is default though, but being used to Windows it's of course nice for me to have one less step to tweak.
However given it's easier for me to change than someone with disabilities, I wouldn't mind single click staying default.
> I'm not familiar with it. Can you elaborate?
Plasma was introduced as the name for KDE's actual DE component (distinct from apps and frameworks) with KDE 4, a major version which was released too early in development and alienated many users due to bugs and missing features compared to KDE 3, hence the "debacle".
Some went to distros with plans to continue supporting KDE 3, some went to XFCE, and some (not me) even thought Gnome 3 was nice. Recall as well that Gnome 2 was still around and supported, and then Mate kept it going. That's what I'm using as I type this.
Edit: BTW, the Trinity DE is still active, so you can still use KDE 3.
Then they released KDE 4 with "Plasma" which had a lot of half baked UI experiments that looked terrible and basically everyone hated. They really didn't listen to users at all, and just pushed through stuff that made no sense at all. They broke a lot of the desktop UI because they added the stupid goal of making it work on tablets too (they were the hot new stuff at the time), despite the very obvious fact that nobody was going to buy a KDE tablet. They even tried to sell one for a while!
It's a little like Gnome's mad decision to move menus to a hamburger, despite that making no sense and essentially everyone hating it.
Probably the thing that characterised the situation most was the "kidney bean". Something the internet seems to have wilfully forgotten (the only reference I can find to it is a comment on LxQT "remember the awful kidney bean?", but you can see it in this screenshot:
https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.1.0/
It's the button at the top right. I can't even remember what it was supposed to do, but it was always there, everyone hated it, you couldn't remove it, and they refused to budge. Of course it was eventually removed. Look at the terrible styling in that screenshot too. Compare it to GNOME:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_2#/media/File:Gnome-2.18...
Essentially they took a system that people liked and changed a load of things in obviously terrible ways, and then refused to budge when people said they didn't like it.
i think the single-click navigation or opening of files was done to mimic how hyperlinks on the internet work. some people are wired that way.
on the other hand, some people have a completely different brain configuration: they think that a single-click should select whereas a double-click should open a file.
there are people who do not agree with both these options. maybe, they want everything to work via audio commands.
how do we decide what the default behavior should be? the answer is: leave it to the user.
It's how both major desktop OSes have worked for literally decades. It works very well. Why be different?
Mimicking hyperlinks doesn't make sense because you never want to move hyperlinks around or rename them. There's rarely a reason to select a hyperlink.
I watched her double-click web links all day long while sitting at the desktop Windows Vista computer. I couldn't do anything to educate her on when to use single and when to use double, because that distinction is just lost on some people, you know?
So I would often send her YouTube links in email, and she always reported back "I couldn't watch this; the sound was horrible! Unlistenable!"
And years, yes years, later, she reported to me that she'd figured out what was messed up about her YouTube experience, because she had been consistently double-clicking every link in her email, and opening two browser tabs to the same content, and it didn't bother her unless it was autoplay video, which would offset the sound by several milliseconds and totally mess it up.