GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 732736
Region selection is confusing
Last modified: 2014-09-09 15:18:43 UTC
Region selection is confusing. If I pick English, I get a screen say "Choose your country or region", and get presented with options such as United States, United Kingdoms, Nigeria, etc etc. Non of these fit the region I live at. It took me few moments to understand it's asking me which variant of English I want. Ideally, you should allow people use English no matter where they live. Someone who doesn't live in those countries presented with this option might stick with a feeling that he selected something wrong. Not everyone who speak English live in those specific countries, and many countries which have English as an official or secondary language are not in the list. Similarly, if I pick Arabic, I don't get to select Israel/Palestine as a region, even tho Arabic is the official language of Palestine and a secondary official language of Israel. This is also kinda related that our locale choices are extremely limited (ie. you can't mix and match) and you don't have, for example, en_IL even tho it could be a popular choice for people in Israel (many people in Israel use their computers in English). In Windows, for comparison, you have an option to select the region (which affects date format, paper format, etc etc) independently of your language.
Particular issues with this should be filed separately. The mappings are partly handled by langtable - https://github.com/mike-fabian/langtable - which is fairly powerful, and should be adjustable to cover most cases. note that g-i-s is an initial setup wizard, meant to cover the most common cases quickly; you *can* choose language, formats and input source separately, from the full set available for each, in 'Region & Language' once you get through g-i-s.
So Rui has an important note on this: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729208#c15 I'll reproduce it here for convenience: "Ok, I think there's a huge misunderstanding here and people are talking past each others. I myself was confused by the current state of g-i-s in this area since I thought the code was still doing mostly what g-c-c does, just with a different face, but it turns out that I was wrong since Matthias changed the code last December. Basically what's currently in g-i-s tries to implement the designs Allan linked above. But I believe that the implementation doesn't match the design in what it actually does. Let's go back to what g-c-c does (and what I thought g-i-s was doing): a) Language selects a full locale (e.g. en_US) and sets it as LANG (i.e. what effectively ends up as LC_MESSAGES aka the UI locale) b) Region selects a full locale (e.g. fr_FR) and sets it as as LC_TIME, LC_NUMERIC, LC_MONETARY, etc, i.e. it sets the "formats" locale aka "how your clock looks" and "how your numbers are formatted in the UI. The current g-i-s doesn't do b) entirely and instead splits the UI for choosing a) into 2 steps which confusingly are called Language and Region selection but what they do is actually choose the first and second elements of a locale which gets applied as LANG. e.g. first you choose "en" and then you choose "UK" and en_UK ends up applied as LANG. Now, I don't know if Matthias misinterpreted the design or the design missed the point of a) and b) as explained above. If the current g-i-s implementation is indeed what the design intended, then we can't show all "regions" in the 2nd step since that wouldn't make any sense since it's not how locales work, i.e. you can't mix the 1st and 2nd elements of a locale arbitrarily. In fact, a locale *is* a language, i.e. en_UK and en_US are two *different* languages technically and we just can't change this fact. I think the problem is that some people (including me FWIW) think of choosing a "Region" as choosing the "formats" locale, so I'd say we should either re-label the current "Region" page in g-i-s to something else or just remove it and go back to only have the Language page with a single list like ... English (United Kindgom) English (United States) ... Otherwise, if the design wanted the Region page to actually be about the "formats" locale then the whole page needs to be fixed."
I think it's a problem that you can only set your entire locale by choosing a 'language' (with no 'UK English is a language'-type hedging), when we know there are multiple locales for the same language that are different (en_US vs. en_GB for instance, zh_CN vs. zh_TW...) I suspect the ideal solution from a *design* perspective is that just two screens - 'Language' and 'Region' - result in a locale that the user will want to use as LANG and LC_* . I'm not sure if this is entirely feasible, though - I believe there are cases where the user may want to use LC_* settings from a locale which does not match the language they want the system to use. From a *technical* perspective obviously the easiest and most reliable thing to do is explicitly ask the user for all the necessary info, but of course that may not be acceptable UX.
Created attachment 285747 [details] [review] Skip the region page People seem to be confused about this page, assuming that it's meant to set the formatting of dates, currency and measurements while it's actually about selecting the regional variant of the language selected in the language page. This will need design work to fix properly so, for now, we'll just disable this page and present all the language variants in the first page.
Created attachment 285748 [details] [review] language: Show all locales Instead of having the locale selection split in two pages, this shows all locales in the first page. The country is displayed along with the language on each row.
This was discussed in #gnome-design. We'll revisit after 3.14 Attachment 285747 [details] pushed as a3c70fd - Skip the region page Attachment 285748 [details] pushed as c911e21 - language: Show all locales