-5

Double-click is a sh*t.

skeightley wrote:Indoctrination? The thought of comparing established usability paradigms to indoctrination seems foolish.

Well, it may seem foolish to you, ok. But that says nothing about the truth of your claim.
It is a fact that traditionally the unixoid style is a single click, whilst the MS-Windows style is a double click. Before that background the term "indoctrination" does not sound foolish at all to me.

skeightley wrote:It's like saying the use of QWERTY keyboards is because we've all been indoctrinated to do so.

Which is precisely what is the case. There are many competing keyboard layouts. And whilst QUERTY might be one of the more popular it is still is based on a historical decision. That means many people have grown up using it which is why it is wide spread today. There certainly are better layouts like DVORAK for example. And there are international layouts that have little in common with QUERTY.

Just my reaction to that blunt "I know what is right" statement, sorry.

Since I am used to Windows and other file managers behaviour, I am also experiencing a single click as "awkward". But that does not mean that it is a bad default.

As @arkascha already mentioned, the QWERTY layout is not the ideal one. Also see http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/ for some background and better approaches.

So I could understand if the single click behaviour is because of ergonomic / whatever reasons.
There is still the argument of a need to change for most users like they have with better layouts than QWERTY, which should not be undereastimated when it comes to gain new users, but I could understand a decision towards using the more ideal option.

Unfortunately currently I did not read anything explaining why this behaviour is default other than "it is the Unixoid standard behaviour". So also some legacy argument that should not count.

Maybe there are some studies, research, etc. that could be linked and can be discussed here.

Also if single click really comes out to be the better option and stays default I'd really like to see that explained somewhere on FAQ, Wiki etc. pages to convince users coming from Windows etc. that this was a thoughtful decision.

Else I'd vote for making double click the default.

This seems like a good candidate for a first-time wizard to allow users to select their preferred behavior; considering this is such a controversial option. I recall KDE 3.5 had such a first-time wizard and this was one of the options.