KDE Plasma 6 gets double-click to open by default and other improvements

Single click to select. Double click to open.
This is the way.

I'm sure they have statistics to know which one people use more often (or rather, how many people do that change immediately), so they'll simply have made that the default.

For people who are interested in single vs double click, Nate left a comment about how they reached their decision.

It boils down to our market position. People who use KDE Plasma are vastly more likely to be switching from another desktop OS than they are to be using Plasma as their very first desktop OS experience. And switchers know double-click

I don't really understand how KDE do things, it seems they don't really care about consistency and/or user friendliness they do what they want and if it breaks things so be it.

The ability to monitor GPU was first broken in 2021 because they didn't want users to access raw sensors and what the driver was presenting to avoid duplicates I suppose so you had to patch it to revert from blacklisting those sensors. As a result every fix was broken by a new driver, I hope this time it will be fixed for good.

Add to that the fact that KSysGuard was nice and tidy, now you have so much real estate lost, when I monitor things I think the density of data visible in one go is important.

In the mean time Psensor never had a problem to monitor anything.

Plus, in Plasma a lot of settings seem to come and go in the UI after every upgrade and you need to search in 5 different config files to put back your preferences.

I think it's kinda funny how upset some people get at a change like this single vs double click thing. Every time I play with KDE and it's been in default single click mode, I go and change it to double in 5 seconds and get on with life. It makes sense to default to more familiar or most often used settings.

Single click to select. Double click to open.
This is the way.

Exactly! What kinda savage uses single click for opening things outside of a web browser? This has always been the case.

Add to that the fact that KSysGuard was nice and tidy, now you have so much real estate lost, when I monitor things I think the density of data visible in one go is important.

I'm not sure what about this isn't nice and tidy (also, yes, my PC is named ubertoaster ).
I mean, what I personally use it most for is checking/killing processes so I set the processes view to be the default when you open the program. And that view seems to be pretty much identical to ksysguard?

In the mean time Psensor never had a problem to monitor anything.

Had a ton of problems for me and regularly kicked the bucket while the machine was running.
And that is across multple machines with different mixtures of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. And different distros, too.

To be honest, I don't even know what the widgets I currently use for displaying temps use, but it isn't psensor (the package is not installed).
But whatever it is, it has worked for me flawlessly so far.

Plus, in Plasma a lot of settings seem to come and go in the UI after every upgrade and you need to search in 5 different config files to put back your preferences.

Not my experience at all. Unless you count major version upgrades - in that case, some incompatibilities is kind of what you'd expect.
But I agree it would be nice if they put more effort into converting settings from older versions.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 29 August 2023 at 12:23 pm UTC

The system monitoring was broken with a NVIDIA driver update that added and re-ordered columns in nvidia-smi output. The number and order was hardcoded in ksysguard so since things didn't line up it was skipped altogether. The fix in 5.27.8 was to make it identify the columns dynamically so it shouldn't break again.

I have my own hacky patch against 5.27.6 that corrects the ordering. Backporting the upstream fix was too hairy.

I uh, thought the double click was the default for long now. Doesn't matter to me, I will configure it to single click anyway.

Add to that the fact that KSysGuard was nice and tidy, now you have so much real estate lost, when I monitor things I think the density of data visible in one go is important.

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I'm not sure what about this isn't nice and tidy (also, yes, my PC is named ubertoaster ).
I mean, what I personally use it most for is checking/killing processes so I set the processes view to be the default when you open the program. And that view seems to be pretty much identical to ksysguard?

In the mean time Psensor never had a problem to monitor anything.

Had a ton of problems for me and regularly kicked the bucket while the machine was running.
And that is across multple machines with different mixtures of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. And different distros, too.

To be honest, I don't even know what the widgets I currently use for displaying temps use, but it isn't psensor (the package is not installed).
But whatever it is, it has worked for me flawlessly so far.

Plus, in Plasma a lot of settings seem to come and go in the UI after every upgrade and you need to search in 5 different config files to put back your preferences.

Not my experience at all. Unless you count major version upgrades - in that case, some incompatibilities is kind of what you'd expect.
But I agree it would be nice if they put more effort into converting settings from older versions.

The fact that you have a minWidth and minHeight is already a problem in itself, but I use more graphs in my page and it is impossible to display the legend because it takes all the space, for example Core temps and load with 20 cores. The titles for each panel are way too big for me so legend + title take the same space than the graph itself that is really small and harder to read.

Psensor pulls data from sensor available through the system nothing more.

And yes, I was mainly talking about major updates that brake a thing every time for me (as an example from the back of my head the delay in ms between clicks for a double-click).

Also note that I am on Debian so every time it comes with something broken it is likely to stay that way for 2 years if it is only fixed in major version and not backported…

Good decision. Single-click never seemed to make any sense for me (and probably not for most users). While it always was easy enough to change, the default behavior should be what the majority of users would expect.

Generally, KDE has grown a lot on me over the years. I used to be firmly in GNOME (2) territory for many years, but I never really liked GNOME 3. KDE was trying too hard to look like Windows for a long while, but it's a really good alternative these days. Switched a year or two ago, and not going back to GNOME.

I don't use KDE anymore, but the one thing I adopted from Dolphin (which is an amazing file manager) is single-click open. It just makes so much more sense. Why click twice when you can click once? I have single-click behavior enabled for Nautilus, though Nautilus is not as good as Dolphin because it doesn't have select handles. Nonetheless, it's comfortable.

What was that KDE motto again? Familiar by Default, Powerful When Needed?

I use single-key open in lf, too

The very first thing I did when I made the switch from Windows to Linux KDE was change it to double click to open....... Its good to have options but having single click to open as default....... Yeah...... Nah......

Single click to open is the right way as far as I'm concerned. It just makes the most sense when you consider that the interface in every other piece of software you use on a computer only requires single clicks, so why should the desktop be the sole exception?

Single click to open is the right way as far as I'm concerned. It just makes the most sense when you consider that the interface in every other piece of software you use on a computer only requires single clicks, so why should the desktop be the sole exception?

Because of Windows. I grew up on Windows, and first experienced single click in KDE when trying to select a file. I thought my mouse button was super sensitive or something.

Single click to select. Double click to open.
This is the way.

True, can't tell you how often I've fubar'd something up due to single clicks to open/execute/move/break things...

Got to have a bit of buffer for us clumsy mortals!

Single click to open is the right way as far as I'm concerned. It just makes the most sense when you consider that the interface in every other piece of software you use on a computer only requires single clicks, so why should the desktop be the sole exception?

It is rather easy to accidentally do a single click.
Happens to me quite often.

Usually, nothing happens as the cursor isn't really on top of anything.
When that opens a link, it doesn't really matter, just go back quickly.
When that opens an entire program, that's a massive problem as it'll likely take focus away, might make the PC slower for a moment, forces you to close that program again, etc.

When you accidentally select something, that's not really a problem.
Accidentally double clicking is not something that really happens.

And what makes the most sense in practice is what most people are used to, not something that might or might not make sense in a bubble detached from that reality.
Especially when the difference in usage isn't that big (like the time difference of a double vs single click).

Single click to open is the right way as far as I'm concerned. It just makes the most sense when you consider that the interface in every other piece of software you use on a computer only requires single clicks, so why should the desktop be the sole exception?

Because of Windows. I grew up on Windows, and first experienced single click in KDE when trying to select a file. I thought my mouse button was super sensitive or something.

Windows does it wrong.

Single click to open is the right way as far as I'm concerned. It just makes the most sense when you consider that the interface in every other piece of software you use on a computer only requires single clicks, so why should the desktop be the sole exception?

It is rather easy to accidentally do a single click.
Happens to me quite often.

Usually, nothing happens as the cursor isn't really on top of anything.
When that opens a link, it doesn't really matter, just go back quickly.
When that opens an entire program, that's a massive problem as it'll likely take focus away, might make the PC slower for a moment, forces you to close that program again, etc.

When you accidentally select something, that's not really a problem.
Accidentally double clicking is not something that really happens.

And what makes the most sense in practice is what most people are used to, not something that might or might not make sense in a bubble detached from that reality.
Especially when the difference in usage isn't that big (like the time difference of a double vs single click).

Frankly, I don't have a problem with randomly clicking around the desktop and unintentionally opening stuff, but based on your argument, nothing in a user interface should be accessible with a single click, and yet, it's standard to be able to open menu items with one click, or toggle a button in something like Libre Office with one click. The only exception is the desktop. I know it's what people are used to because that's how UI designers made it back in the dark ages of computer interface design, but in my opinion, they got it wrong.

Frankly, I don't have a problem with randomly clicking around the desktop and unintentionally opening stuff, but based on your argument, nothing in a user interface should be accessible with a single click, and yet, it's standard to be able to open menu items with one click, or toggle a button in something like Libre Office with one click.

I don't think you really understood the argument.

It's cool that you are so perfect that you never make such an easy to make mistake, but for the rest of us, well...

Why do you think games ask you "Do you really want to overwrite/load/delete save X?" ?
Not because people would be too dumb to understand that clicking the load/delete/etc. button would actually load/delete/etc.
Not because people click around at random (but thanks for going "ur so stoopid randomly clicking around LOL").
Because it is normal that people trigger a single click on stuff without intending to. It just happens. Not often, obviously, but it does and it is annoying when it does.

For me it happens most often when I bump my mouse into something on the desk.

So when an action would be very disruptive (like accidentally opening a file) or even harmful and not easily undone and when basically every single action would be like that (such as interacting with folders and files in a file browser), then you make the default harder to trigger by accident.

When you navigate a browser or operate most menus, most single click actions are not like described above at all, so it is fine to have them activate by single click. The few that are disruptive can then be "caught" with these confirmations.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 30 August 2023 at 11:50 am UTC

Frankly, I don't have a problem with randomly clicking around the desktop and unintentionally opening stuff, but based on your argument, nothing in a user interface should be accessible with a single click, and yet, it's standard to be able to open menu items with one click, or toggle a button in something like Libre Office with one click.

I don't think you really understood the argument.

It's cool that you are so perfect that you never make such an easy to make mistake, but for the rest of us, well...

Why do you think games ask you "Do you really want to overwrite/load/delete save X?" ?
Not because people would be too dumb to understand that clicking the load/delete/etc. button would actually load/delete/etc.
Not because people click around at random (but thanks for going "ur so stoopid randomly clicking around LOL").
Because it is normal that people trigger a single click on stuff without intending to. It just happens. Not often, obviously, but it does and it is annoying when it does.

For me it happens most often when I bump my mouse into something on the desk.

So when an action would be very disruptive (like accidentally opening a file) or even harmful and not easily undone and when basically every single action would be like that (such as interacting with folders and files in a file browser), then you make the default harder to trigger by accident.

When you navigate a browser or operate most menus, most single click actions are not like described above at all, so it is fine to have them activate by single click. The few that are disruptive can then be "caught" with these confirmations.

I never implied that you were stupid. You came up with that yourself.

As for programs that ask "Are you sure?" before allowing the user to do something potentially destructive and irreversible, that's more to warn about the consequences of an intended action than it is to protect against accidental clicks, and good interface design will build in additional safeguards, such as burying the feature two levels deep in a menu where the user has to go through a series of specific steps to access it.

But we're not talking about anything like that, we're talking about activities like navigating files and directories in Dolphin where the user's chances of doing anything catastrophic that would warrant an "Are you sure?" prompt are essentially zero.

Face it, standard desktop behavior requiring a double click is the "odd man out" in computer interface design.


Last edited by Mountain Man on 31 August 2023 at 1:07 am UTC