Comment 5 for bug 1236203
Revision history for this message
| Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote Re: [greeter] [indicators] Design requests that the clock is shown in 24 hour mode by default (i.e. they don't want to see the AM/PM part) | #5 |
Defaulting to 24-hour time seems quite reasonable if (like Olga, or me) you've spent years in a country where 24-hour time is common. But if you haven't, it seems daft. With the clock in the status bar, we similarly had an edict that it should always show 24-hour time, as a way of saving space. The American indicator engineers refused, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that except for people in the military, hardly any Americans would understand it. So we continued with the previous design: time display is tied to your locale, which in System Settings is called "Display language" because that's ~99% of its visible effect.
Of course, not being able to change the time display without also changing the display language is also daft. It's a decades-old problem stemming from Ubuntu's reliance on the GNU locale system, which assumes that every single person using a particular locale wants exactly the same settings for time display, date display, currency display, alphabetizing, and number formatting. Windows, Mac OS, and iOS have always been better at this. I've just reported bug 1392699 on fixing it for Ubuntu.
In the meantime, I suggest that the Clock app include its own 12-/24-hour setting. This is what we did for the menu bar clock on Ubuntu for PC. (The setting sits in System Settings, for want of a better place, but it explicitly applies only to the "clock in the menu bar".) One way of doing this would be for tapping on the clock face to toggle not just between analog and digital, but between analogue, 12-hour digital, and 24-hour digital.