Currently, Nautilus displays file sizes in kibibytes, mebibytes, and gibibytes (the dialog fields are mislabed, but that is another issue). These units are difficult for users to work with, and often cause user confusion over exactly how much capacity is required to store a file, or how much a disk drive will provide. Users have gone to such length as launching lawsuites against drive manufacturers because they trusted the information from their computer over that from the drive's packaging. This issue has been dealt with in various ways: * KDE's Dolphin uses correctly-labelled kibibytes * OS X's Finder uses kilobytes * Nautilus and Windows Explorer use kibibytes, but mislabel them as kilobytes * Except our CD burner, which uses labelled kibibytes
In my opinion, both the OS X and KDE options are far superior to what we use now. Using decimal sizes ala OS X lets users apply existing expectations about the metric system to their computer. The KDE option is less friendly, but at least users will be able to check which is being used if it matters. Using "MB" for both is actively user-hostile: the unintuitive power is used, but with no warning to the user. A glib maintainer has rejected my proposal to properly label the return value of g_format_size_for_display, which leaves changing the behavior of Nautilus. Could we please modify nautilus to display file sizes in decimal units? I've got the patch prepared already, though have held off on registering the bug after the response from the glib team. -- nautilus-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list
