[greeter] [indicators] Design requests that the time is shown in 24 hour mode by default (i.e. they don't want to see the AM/PM part)

[Pete Woods]

As per the subject.

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DESIRED RESOLUTION:
AM/PM should never be shown, irrespective of twelve or 24h clock.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

This is a per-locale thing, do we really want to override the selected locale default?

[Olga Kemmet (olga-kemmet)]

@Saviq: By default the format should be in 24h and no AM/PM should be displayed in the indicator bar.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

Comment #2 contradicts the original description
Its not a good idea IMHO to default to 24 hr format

Also system settings date time explicitly does NOT include a switch for 12 vs 24 and specifies 12 is the default

Can we clarify the fix?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

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.

[Andrea Cimitan (cimi)]

So we keep 12/24 but we remove am/pm from both indicators and greeter?

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Cimi, yes, the argument being "if you don't know whether it's AM or PM you have much bigger problems than that" ;)

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Ideally we'd solve that by means of bug #1392699 instead of hacking around things.

[Olga Kemmet (olga-kemmet)]

This bug is not the root of the problem.
As Matthew described in his #5 comment, users have to be able to choose the time format. Therefor he filed the new bug, describing the need for a visible switch in system settings.

Until we fix this though, we should follow the per-locale distinction, meaning:
If I am in e.g. the USA, my clock will show either 9:45am or 9:45pm.
If I am in e.g. the UK, my clock will show either 9:45 or 21:45.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I apologize for thinking this bug report was about the Clock app instead of the indicators. My comment stands, though, if you replace "similarly" with "a year ago". :-)

[Giorgio Venturi (giorgio-venturi-deactivatedaccount)]

The clock settings should stay in *clock app*. I'd rather second the recommendation above from MPT and provide more flexibility in System Settings.

The Setting apps should show (in the appropriate locales) a 12/24H display setting.

[Giorgio Venturi (giorgio-venturi-deactivatedaccount)]

What I mean with the comment above is the clock app setting should *not* influence the system settings