Language, keyboard layout, number format. That kind of things. The Personal category sounds like it should contain things related to my person, and my language and my email address are in that category, while the current time clearly isn't. So I wouldn't put time under Personal ...

In fact I would rather put it in Hardware. That's where I would look first if only the four categories you listed would exist. But it's certainly not ideal ...
Maybe "Personal" could have a different name which also fits date & time? It does make sense to have it alongside the locale, but not under the heading "Personal" ...

Note that System Settings has already been reorganized once during the 4.x cycle. This was my suggestion back then (work in progress): http://userbase.kde.org/User:Hans/SystemSettings
Everything with a ? means that I was unsure about it. There are certainly things I would change now, most notably the overlap between "Look & feel" and "Workspace & Application Behavior".

@Jens: It seems like our main categories are quite similar, but I also have "Workspace & Application Behavior". Where would all settings that change the behavior of applications and the workspace go under your proposed categories? If I wanted to change the window focus behavior, I wouldn't look under "Personal" nor "Appearance".
(In general I feel that it's hard to separate the appearance of things (e.g. the window decoration) and the behavior (e.g. how windows behave).)

Also, I'm not sure if I agree that things that require a password should be mixed with the other settings. After all they will change the setting for all users, so it seems appropriate to me to put those under "Computer Administration" or something like that.

Ah this is where a youth spent playing and constructing roleplaying games and systems comes in handy (Finally!! )

"It doesn't matter" essentially.

See this was about whether a certain weapon was one kind of weapon or should count as some other kind of weapon (won't bore you with the details) but in the end after an hour or so of horribly nerdy debate we realized it didn't matter. What mattered was that it WAS one or the other so we didn't have to mess it up by creating a third category.
Or for a less nerdy example - why tree's in oil paintings looks like trees until you enlarge the image. The leaves doesn't matter, the bark - who cares? As long as the end result looks like a tree from the correct distance.

This is what the idea of not being precise but being correct comes into play. It doesn't have to be precise, "time" can be in a tad odd in a category, but thats fine. Applications behavior (Appearance in my world) might be something DIFFERENT than just appearance but its applicable in a way and its better to have it there than to make the category descriptions more "precise", like "Workspace & Application Behavior" (oh I could talk on and on about realism in RPG's and why it's bunk about here )

We sort them into categories so that they can be easily handled, the user brings a certain know-how into it AND combine that with a good search feature (like having the search automatically active when opening system settings, which seems to be a plan maybe) it doesn't have to be that precise, just correct.

Yesterday i worked on re-organizing the the system setting but didn't have time to post it. My results are kind similar to Jens suggestion.

My second draft looks like this for Major catagories:
Appearance
Behaviours
Connections (renamed from Network and Connectivity)
Hardware
Me

Here is the whole list. Please forgive me i did not alphabetize the listings.

Appearance

- Application Appearance
+ Style
+ Colours
+ Icons
+ Fonts
+ GTK
+ Emoticons

- Desktop Effects

- Workspace Appearance
+ Window Decorations
+ Cursor Theme
+Desktop Theme
+ Splash Theme
- Login Screen (lightdm)



Me

- Personal Details (renamed from Account Details)
+ Password and User Account
+ Paths

- Web Shortcuts

- Accounts (renamed from IM and VOIP)
+ Messaging (renamed from Accounts)
+ General
+ Social Desktop
+ KDE Wallet
+ Resourses (renamed from Personal Information (Akonadi Resourse))

- Shortcuts and Gestures
+ Custom Shortcuts
+ Standard Keyboard Shortcuts
+ Global Keyboard Shortcuts

- Accessibility
+ Accessibility
+ Text-to-Speech

- Default Applications


- Font Management

- Regional Info (renamed from Locale)
+ Date & Time
+ Country / Region & Language
+ Spell Checker



Behaviours

-Desktop Search

- Window Behaviour
+ Task Switcher
+ Window Behaviour
+ Kwin Scripts
+ Window Rules

- Workspace Behaviour
+Activities
+ Virtual Desktops
+ Screen Edges
+ Workspace

- Application and Sytem Notifications
+ Manage Notifications
+ Other Notifications
+ System Bell
+ Launch Feedback

- File Associations

- Task Scheduler

- Startup and Shutdown
+ autostart
+ Service manager
+ session management



Connections (renamed from Network and Connectivity)
- Printers
- Devices (KDE connect)
- Digital Camera
- Bluetooth
+ Devices
+ File Transfers
+ Adapters

- Input Devices
+ Keyboard
+ Mouse
1) Mouse navigation tab could be combined with 'Advanced' as refers to moving mouse with keyboard
2) Button order controls should be in grouping box like 'icons' directly below it?
+ Touchpad
+ Joystick
+ Graphic Tablet
+ Remote Controls

- Network Settings
+ Proxy
+ Connection Preferences
+ Service Discovery

- SSL Preferences

- Sharing
+ Windows Shares



Hardware

- Colour

- Device Actions

- Display and Monitor
+ Display Configuration
+ Screen Locker
+ Gamma

- Power Management
+ Energy Saving
+ Activity Settings
+ Advanced Settings

- Removable Devices

- Multimedia
+ Audio CDS
+ audio and Video
+ CDDB Retrieval

- About System
- User Manager

Ok awesome Verbalshadow! I mean we all seem to be thinking somewhat the same thing though "Simplification" so that's cool!

How do we go from here then?

As stated previously I do not think it is possible to get a coherent systems settings without merging and reshuffling a number of the modules. Due to the size and nature of the task I think this would actually be a a good topic for a visual design 'sprint'. A nice big room, with a nice being wall, a printout of each module, and an awful lot of bluetack.

Anyway, If I had a choice of re-arrange the top level menus and nothing else then this is how I'd do it now:



edit: didn't really think about the order of the modules in each category though.

Yeah but one thing at a time. I know its not fun just doing it like this but it's what we got to play with

I think your layout make sense and you, me and everyone seems all in agreement on the idea.

If we then continue what you started a few pages earlier and look at how to simplify, improve and make each specific area better we're a good way into the issue.

Hm, looking at all these suggestions and how they all make sense in their own right but are quite different, I'm not so sure if we can find a solution which is much better than what we currently have.

And it seems to me that the top-level categories are not the biggest problem. What seems the bigger problem to me is the naming of the KCMs (or 2nd-level KCM groups) and the 2nd-level grouping in general (both the grouping and the names were very clearly conceived from a technical perspective, not from a user's perspective).

Therefore I think we should not spend too much time on the top-level categories (just choose any given one of the suggestions presented so far) and move to the second level quickly. Especially since we may have to revise the top-level stuff again after we regrouped the second level.

Well maybe some rules for deciding what goes where.

For me my rules looked like this:
It gets filtered through each level then moves to the next:

Me: It is something that is personally related to Me.
Appearance: Does it affect the way system looks? IF yes it goes here.
Connections: It is something that can easily be plug/on or unplug/off thus easy connected.
Behaviours: Does it change the way the defaults work or the way the programs behave.
Hardware: Does it configure the underlying hardware.
Misc: It goes here

So I see that in writing my mental ruleset out that i broke a few of them.
Colour and Fonts should be in appearance.
Network Settings should be in Hardware but plasma-nm connection editor ( which used to have KCM. what happen to it?) would be in connections.

david is right about the need to be in "one place" and group play with the design. Is there any mind mapping software that we can whiteboard on.

I suppose the first question is whether it is possible for the devs to change the 2nd level easily and move things around? I think that's really the key issue now, because if it isn't then I think we should stick to re-arranging and simplifying the UI elements in each KCM like Jens said, and think about the rest later.

If it is, then OK, we can take a bash at it, but because there are so many items I do wonder if it's going to be possible to reach a consensus on a forum such as this. As you said,

colomar wrote:looking at all these suggestions and how they all make sense in their own right but are quite different,

...and this is only going to be amplified once we go deeper. Hence why I suggested that some sort of sprint be done to sort it out, because people meeting in a room are more likely to come to an agreement. It might be the wrong agreement , but an agreement none the less.

verbalshadow wrote:
david is right about the need to be in "one place" and group play with the design. Is there any mind mapping software that we can whiteboard on.

Hmm, didn't think about that!

This looks promising: http://www.mindmup.com

Need to figure out how it works though. But it allows group changing. I'll have a play later on with it as I'm going to be tied up for a couple of hours now.

http://i62.tinypic.com/15rxob7.png
I'd use here, Mageia Control Center solution, with the left column, in order to visually divide into sections the first few levels, so that does not seem too much stuff all at once at the first sight, it may be more ordered.

Returning to the selection boxes, today I took a tour to see what they use in these cases, Windows and Mac, and also their effects on the Desktop using checkboxes selected.
Win Xp Example:
http://blogs.ugidotnet.org/images/blogs ... f3a535.png.
And I realized that the problem for the view, but not in the boxes in the background. In fact, many do not use the white background, but make the information next to the boxes with the same style of the window in the background.
Then I happened to see that this has nothing to do:
http://aranzulla.tecnologia.virgilio.it ... ipad13.jpg
But it would be nice instead of the white background, much more soft and refined, with the right boxes. Mockup but do not know what do you think? I hope you both understand my English

verbalshadow wrote:Well maybe some rules for deciding what goes where.

You brought up an excellent point here!

As the initiator of the KDE Human Interface Guidelines reboot, I find it important to define clear rules to guide not only our own effort, but everyone who writes a new settings module¹ (either someone within KDE or a 3rd party such as a developer from a distribution). Those rules need to be clear yet with a broad enough scope, so that ideally anyone writing a new module knows exactly where to place it when reading the rules.

¹ the "pages" in System Settings, such as "Colors", "Device Actions" etc. Officially they're called KConfig Module, or in short KCM

Just a short thing on what David Wright said about consensus.

Yes we might not get consensus and what gets picked up in the end is not exactly a group choice, in the end what gets picked up by the devs get passed over by the VDG and the HIG team to refine first.
BUT and this is the important issue: every little thread here will get read, it will get mulled over and if we create something MOST of us think is a cool improvement, if it goes with the plans for Plasma Next (futurism, simpler, cleaner etc) and the HIG and VDG teams give a thumbs up (which they will since they will read this thread when we're getting somewhere) then nothing stops us.

If a community of designers (everyone in this thread is one by being part of a design discussion to create a new design language for the settings) can at least reach some kind of vague agreement like we did above then... why not?

Consensus would be cool, general agreements and "well ok then"s are fine too

Lets just do this!

I've been having a look at the desktop effects module. What do you guys think about getting rid of the circled bit?



I was thinking that there are probably two kinds of users: Those that don't want desktop effects, and those that do. Those that do are most definitely going to want 'improved window management' and ' various animations', so I think these should just be enabled by default if the user enables desktop effects, and we can get rid of these check boxes?

Moving on to the desktop switching drop down, for a start the Desktop Cube Animation is most definitely not a simple effect! Had to have a chuckle at that. But really, is any of this necessary? Those that care about how their desktop changes will go venturing in the settings, and those that don't will just live with what they've been given as a default. So I think we can get rid of that as well.

That would just leave the 'enable' check box in the general tab, which could easily be placed on at the top of the 'all effects' tab, essentially cutting this module down into two tabs.

Thoughts?