One of the most wanted features is a new look and layout for System settings. The current one being too muddled and confusing. Now aside from the fact that we have no absolute way of changing it in depth we should start to look at layout and UX.

This is the current one on my stationary computer (in this case Oxygen widget theme and Gaia Recycled I think as window decoration, color and Plasma Theme)



Now we can't do that radical a change sadly. But we can recreate the layout.

Like for example, merging "Common Appearance and Behavior" with "Workspace Appearence and Behavior" would be a good start. Perhaps removing certain things from it like "file associations", "default applications" and "desktop search" from a new category called simply "Looks" or something short and simplistic. Remember the idea that the name has to be technically correct is complete hogwash - the idea isn't that its technically correct just that it is simple to understand what that category contain.

"Account Details", "Personal Information" and "Instant Message and VOIP" - all names that mean close to nothing btw - could be placed in its own category at the very top since they contain things that a user would want to have the second he or she installs a laptop - the "Essentials" or "Social Dashboard" something.

"Font Management" is just strange tbh - its a way to install system wide fonts and should be replaced under "Application Appearence" and its subgroup "Fonts". Even if it isn't REEALLY about appearance it makes sense to merge the two.

I also suggest a HIDDEN "Advanced" section where things like SSL preferences, Printer and other things get squeezed in.

Simply put I want to change the category's so a user can go from top to bottom where all the main essentials are at the top - the techy bits at the bottom.

After that I would like to dive in and change the categories themselves and the settings (removing the horrible "sliders" with reference to milliseconds and other meaningless information no one uses.

What do you guys think?

/Jens, still having a fever

when last did you try system settings in "Classic Tree View"?

We've had an "Advanced" category before - and it ended up as a dumping ground for everything. Please note that the System Settings UI itself is fully pluggable, so one can do some experimenting with the module selection interface without interfering too much (if I recall, some Blue Systems folks had a QML version of the icons interface running at some point).

I know they (Blue System) made a different layout for settings for Netrunner - but I think there is allot more to be done.

The idea of a dumping ground is at the moment preferable to the current situation because those who know what they are looking for tend to be able to find it no matter what and those that don't need a more precise description of subjects and areas - but just because something didn't work a while back doesn't mean that the exact same thing will happen again.

But lets look at names: "Account Details" what does that refer to to the casual user? Or we can check out the idea that the very practical reality of the desktop theme's in actuality being two different things should for that reason by represented as two different areas which doesn't make sense at all.

Now if we could edit every little sliver of it that would be lovelly but we don't have the time - take settings for the touchpad which has been discussed in the public parts of the forum - makes absolute sense but even those who simply try to cut away a lot have recreated massive issues that could be removed.

Let say you have a touchpad setting with support for five fingers, with gestures and stuff like that - you'd still just need about three checkboxes and one scrolldown menu for the basic most relevant settings. ("Tap to click", "Two-finger scroll" and "Disable while typing" as checkboxes and then one menu for pointer speed very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast) The rest can be crammed into a massive Advanced section because they usually don't matter and if they do matter searching for them is not an issue in comparison.
The same can be said for all settings - they assume the user want every control at his or her fingertips when in fact they just want the one they use. As long as the controls they use are easily accessible. As it is now we are building a town car with the control system of a space ship and assuming that all users are astronauts and that the few astronauts that ARE users somehow are also rather slow and can't be bothered with finding what they need.

The system settings are almost universally acknowledged as "a problem" so we should make a point of changing it.

Cuan: Yes I have, it didn't help much.

Please note that by dumping ground, I mean something that was totally uncategorised - modules which controlled sharing of files and sound policy were mixed together among other things. Even for those who know what they're looking for, categorisation and useful names are still necessary.

Rather than cramming things into a "massive advanced section" (which can be intimidating even to advanced users) I'd suggest breaking things up into sensible groupings - with the most commonly used ones coming first.

As an example - scroll areas and trigger corners for touchpad's belong together, and are something non-advanced people may still wish to configure. Burying this on the Advanced page will make people believe it is unsupported.

Oh yes absolutely.... I didn't mean just one category called "advanced" and leave it at that.

Subcategories etc...

we should remove everything and just display the search query "what are you looking for". that once was the idea of martin graeslin (kwin developer) and its the best idea for the systemsettings.
its just so that we can reorganize it with every release but the user woulnt find the right thing. but a "mouse"+ENTER to open mouse settings is much better then some 'input device' settings with submenu mouse or something else. on top of this we could remove all this big fat list of icons and menus.

If someone is interested in developing that, the existing code would support doing so through a plugin. Infrastructure to search various attributes of the control modules has already been implemented.

I don't think removing everything will solve it - I mean the main reason why we display as much as possible is so that we know what is and isn't accessible. But a better made search function, one which is given a more central role seems like an awesome idea (perhaps I should reach out to Vishesh and the Baloo guys and ask them?).

The main issue is functionality and for functionality to work we need to slim down the number of choices and make them accessible.

I think we could go down to
Personal (or "Users") - where we stick control over users, social network logins, language and location settings.
Appearance - where we have Theme, Wallpaper, Color and Pointer.
Hardware - Mouse/Touchpad, Keyboard, Graphic Tablet/Joystick, Printers, Display (A mix of Display/monitor, Colors and Multimedia)
Network - Firewall, Sharing and Bluetooth
Other - where the distro can stick Yast, Software Sources whatever tickles their fancy

All five tabs also have an Advanced Section where more fine grained work can be set, so that instead of an "advanced section" where you can squeeze in any old settings you put it in one of the five categories.

The advanced section is not a Sudo-section - the idea is that whenever you edit, say theme, in the NON-advanced section you can get the choice to set it for the entire computer giving you a pop-up window demanding login. This so it still is usable even for trickier admin roles.
The correct way would be to try to link all sections in the System Settings to one bit in the system tray. The idea being that a person could use the system settings to change something, then click "go to advanced" in the system tray popup and go straight to that section in the System Settings.

Visually the definer between Normal and Advanced is that Normal has no finegrained controls, no "how many milliseconds" details - just drop down menu's with word definitions like "Fast" or "Slow" or "Doubletap drag". In the advanced section we can throw a space ship control at people - let them really dig into the milliseconds of speed or whatever but by sticking to something simple and above all coherent in the normal section we can actually make them accessible.

Lets look at "Appearance" - by limiting the choices in "Normal" to "Theme", "Color" and "Pointer" we create a situation where people can TRY something and then perhaps get interested in learning the advanced settings. We need to construct a situation where the Theme can be used to pick three things at once - the Plasma Theme, the Widget Theme and the Window Decorations - the Megatheme. Say you have "Plasma" as a theme it sets it to our widget theme, our window decoration and our Plasma Theme.
If the user then thinks "balls to this I want that Plasma Theme but not the window decorations!" - he or she clicks advanced and up opens all the current settings - we simply squeeze them all into a secondary window. No changes. No nothing. Beyond ordering them into Appearance, Users, Hardware, Network and Other.

This would be a "eat cake and have it" situation. New users will be invited to change things - where as old users will still have all their settings to play with.

Ok so the worlds uglies mockup of what I ment.

So this is kinda the idea for the "Normal" or "Basic" settings. Something very very simplistic without any bells and whistles. Just a place to easily and without fuss set some things you use daily.



Then this one is what you see when you click "Advanced"



And this horrendous hack of a mockup is what happens when you click one of the icons in advanced. Clicking "Back" takes you to the advanced layout - and clicking any other of the side rows "appearance", "user" etc brings you to THAT areas "advanced" section if (and the basic section if you're going from a basic section.

Just adding something I had thought about for a long time.

Personally I only use the search field in systemsettings, because otherwise I find it unusable. Thus I would like to have a UI which enforces the search. Just like on Google start page one big search field and as soon as you type you show the categories and the items.

Well the issue with searches is that you need to know what it is you intend to find and what it might be called. That works if you feel comfortable with your ability to define what it is you want, that you have an actual goal with what you want to do and that you trust your computer (it's the "duckduckgo" issue - you know that the results are a "pure google search if you add !g infront of it but it still feels kinda alien and "unsafe").
Plus there is the thing of spatial memory. Now I tried doing a search for what I wanted blindly - but I couldn't remember the name of the thing I intended to find because to me it's in the top row, second column. It's why the code to my door 1478 is described as an "L" to friends or why I chose 2046 as a pincode for my library card (a cross) or why when I switch from English to Swedish on my laptop I have to actively search for things (because the System Settings is ordered alphabetically so everything switches places).

Now that may be just me - because I suck at numbers and names but I'm really good with faces, places, looks and spatial definers.
(My mother claims that if it wheren't for the fact that it hurt like hell and she remembers the occasion she would claim that I am probably not her biological son since unlike her and the rest of her side of the family I can't work with numbers for **** )

So I really think a combined method would be best. For example, would it be possible to make certain that when you open system settings you will already be in the search field? (like google) So that a person who knows the name can easily just start typing after opening it and get to the exact setting?
Also I think that the results should be the advanced settings by default when you search.

I mean then for you, Martin, it would just be "Open System Settings, start typing, get exact result" while still keeping the visuals for thickos like me

There is another thing that I've been thinking about too and that is naming. We should try to really go through all the names for the settings and then rework them - I mean the way we set things differ and that needs to be fixed (so instead of having sliders, dropdown menus, checkboxes and buttons for identical choices we go with one method and use it across the board) but the naming rules needs to be looked over as well - we need to use headers and subheaders more aggressively I think. A simple and welcoming header with the current technically correct names as subheader?

Whilst I think the search concept is quite workable - as well as the five categories you mentioned, the mockup is probably too far in terms of simplification in that it would make configuring a system nearly impossible.

Actually, I agree with pretty much all that was written here so far, even with the contradicting things

I agree with Martin that the search function is pretty much the only way to find what you're looking for in the jungle that is the current System Settings, and actually it already works pretty well for me, too. And I agree that it should be made more prominent.

However, I also agree with Jens that search-only isn't a good solution. There is an excellent article on Ask Tog about search vs. browse and why one cannot replace the other: http://www.asktog.com/columns/085BrowseVsSearch.html
While search is great once you have a feeling for what's there, browsing is important to get that feeling. Unless you know which things you can configure, you might not even know that you can, or under which name you may find it.

I like the "Basic vs. Advanced" thing in general, but it needs a lot care to work well. Deciding which settings are "basic" should not be guesswork, because our own perception of what is "basic" may not match with that of the majority of our users.

For me, the very first thing we should do is re-thinking the groups and the names of the groups and modules, given that we can rearrange and rename them relatively freely, regardless of which module comes from which software package. I think this is the typical 80% of of the problem that can be solved with 20% of the effort.
A second thing could be to make the search function more prominent. Giving it focus by default is natural to me (since it's the only place where people can input text), and maybe we can make it visually more prominent as well.

Focus can't be given to the search bar by default as that breaks keyboard based navigation unfortunately - you have to tab to it otherwise.