GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 647442
System Info contains settings
Last modified: 2011-10-21 20:13:29 UTC
Description of problem: The entry 'System Info' contains settings for default applications and fallback mode. Something that is called *info* should not contain settings but only display information. With the term 'System Info' it is very hard to find these settings. Either move them somewhere else (I think preferred apps is worth a menu entry of it's own) or rename the entry in the control center. Matthias said that typing 'Preferred' or 'Application' will bring up the proper entry, but I think this is still not intuitive enough as the entry that is shown is 'System Info' but not the setting we really want.
Sorry, wrong keyword.
The name of this panel changed a number of times. It still may not be perfect but it works ok. It does have settings and stuff in it and I think that's ok too. We don't have to be that pedantic.
It does not work ok because people find that settings only through the search box. But what if you don't know what to search for because you don't remember the extact term or the strings are not translated?
*** Bug 649479 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #3) > It does not work ok because people find that settings only through the search > box. But what if you don't know what to search for because you don't remember > the extact term The keywords support in the control-center allows for more than one keyword, and we've added quite a few already. > or the strings are not translated? Then we can't really help. We can't design a system where we'd ask ourselves "what if it's not translated" at every step.
I really think this is a bad name. It was first meant to show, well, system information. But now it's not the case. It's not being pedantic to say that information and settings are clearly different things, and that users expectations don't match the contents of the panel. Maybe we don't need to split it into separate panels, but it's worth changing the name. As I said, "Information" is wrong, so remove it. Is "System" enough? That's already the name of the category. So I suggest we call it "Desktop", since the common point of all these tabs is that they are about general settings/information. If we can't find a name to agree on, then it could mean the Preferred apps tab should be merged with Removable Media: it could be called Preferred Applications, and that would also be an intuitive solution IMHO. Would you please reopen this bug? I wouldn't dare to do it myself... ;-)
Merging it with "Removable Media" sounds like a good solution to me. I think the fallback mode really doesn't need to be very discoverable as it should be detected which mode to use and we don't encourage people to change that setting. But there were various people asking on IRC and mailing list where preferred applications can be found now so it seems to be practically difficult to discover. Of course we have searching but I must admit that I don't use it when looking for settings and I would only see this as a bad workaround for having ambiguous panel names.
This really is a UX issue. To suggest that something can maybe be found by the search box (... and for the record, 'Preferred' doesn't show anything for me when searching system settings and nothing will bring up this feature when searching from the Activities overview) completely misses how undiscoverable this really is... I originally tripped over "Default Apps" by accident. I never thought to search because there's no icon in System Settings that even remotely indicates such an option might exist. I like the idea of merging with Removable Media and creating Preferred Applications. Then, in System Info the data displayed on the "Graphics" page could be merged with the Overview page (the Graphics card info is already duplicated here which seems weird).
*** Bug 647049 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 646527 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 662406 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***