usage of mixed units (bytes, MiB, GiB) for file size and space

[Jan]

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
gnome-utils 2.30.0-0ubuntu1
gparted 0.5.1-1ubuntu2
nautilus 1:2.30.1-0ubuntu1
synaptic 0.63.1ubuntu6

Several programs show mixed units in the same table. This is impractical and confusing as you have to compare manually. Please see the attached screenshots for examples.

A simple solution would be to use one default unit (for each program):
GParted: GiB
Nautilus & baobab: MiB
Synaptic: KiB

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This is very much intentional behavior. If you have one disk that is only 100mb and one that is 64gb, they need to be shown with different units or you would have very large/small numbers.

[Timothy Arceri (t-fridey)]

This is not a bug it makes sense to use different units in different applications.

In the real world I go to the supermarket and things are for sale in grams and kilograms. When I hire a removal truck its rated in tonnes.
Could you imagine how confusing it would be to walk into the supermarket and try to work out the price of apples if they were marked at $2 per 1000 grams. Or to hire a 1,500,000 gram truck.

Maybe the difference between kb, Mb, Gb, Tb is harder to understand for those country's not using the metric system.

Also this is not what the upstream Nautilus bug is about. The upstream bug is about the use of different units in Nautilus itself which again I dont think is an issue in fact I think its more useful to have something displayed as 1.5Gb rather than 1,500,000 Kb as suggested.

For those who dont know:
The K in Kb stands for Kilo which is 1,000
The M in Mb stands for Mega which is 1,000,000 (One Million)
The G in Gb stands for Giga which is 1,000,000,000 (One Billion)
The T in Tb sands for Tera which is 1,000,000,000,000 (One Trillion)

In other words each unit is just multiples of 1,000.
Kb is 1,000 bytes, Mb is 1,000 Kb, Gb is 1,000 Mb, Tb is 1,000 Gb

In summary this is just one of those things you should learn about to use you computer effectively. It will also he you when deciding the specifications of your next computer, tablet, smartphone, etc

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Further to comment #5, I'm belatedly closing this issue after over 8 years of no activity. Ubuntu is and will always be a collection of software written by various authors and projects so differences will always occur.

It is beyond Ubuntu's capability to continually patch numerous packages to optionally report values in the way that some users might want so I'm changing the status of all tasks to "Invalid".