The list of media cannot currently be sorted alphabetically. Although it is possible to manually reorder the items, the process becomes tedious when many disks are mounted (e.g. on our workstations in the lab, we all have over 30 nfs disks mounted simultaneously). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Mount many disks, e.g. via nfs 2. Start Dolphin 3. Actual Results: The disks appear in a (seemingly) random order. Expected Results: The default behavior may reflect some sensible criterion (mount order maybe?), and need not be changed. In addition, the possibility to manually sort the items in a custom order is a great option. Therefore, a possible solution may simply be to add an entry (e.g. 'sort alphabetically') in the right-click menu for the Media section title in the Places panel.
Thanks for the idea, but to be honest, I'm not sure if sorting devices by name is such a common action that it's worth cluttering the context menu with it. I would guess that most users are either happy with the default order or want to order the devices according to their own preference, which is probably mostly not "sort by name".
Please keep in mind that GNU/Linux systems are also commonly used in multiple-user, networked configurations. While it is certainly important to cater to the needs of home users, one of the traditional strenghts of KDE has been that it also provided advanced functionality for more complex setups (in our case, a research lab), far better than e.g. Windows or MacOS systems - wouldn't it be a pitty to lose this advantage? Manually ordering dozens of media on several workstations for each user is not really a user-friendly task, and the right-click menu only lists 3 items so there is little risk of cluttering ;o) By the way, what is the default sort order? Our disks appear in random order. Maybe the default could be alphabetical? BTW, in our lab most young investigators have no previous experience with GNU/Linux. We are trying to introduce them to free software. My suggestions to the KDE bug tracker are mostly based on feedback I get from the team.
Thanks for the feedback. (In reply to comment #2) > Please keep in mind that GNU/Linux systems are also commonly used in > multiple-user, networked configurations. While it is certainly important to > cater to the needs of home users, one of the traditional strenghts of KDE > has been that it also provided advanced functionality for more complex > setups (in our case, a research lab), far better than e.g. Windows or MacOS > systems - wouldn't it be a pitty to lose this advantage? We never had any way to sort the devices by name. I don't see how we lose an advantage if we continue to not have one. > Manually ordering dozens of media on several workstations for each user is > not really a user-friendly task, and the right-click menu only lists 3 items > so there is little risk of cluttering ;o) Yes, it may seem so, and I also see that such an option might be helpful in your use case. But we get requests for new options at least once per week. All of these suggestions make sense for a small user group, but if we always said "yes", Dolphin would quickly turn into an unusable mess. > By the way, what is the default sort order? Our disks appear in random > order. Maybe the default could be alphabetical? We receive the list of devices from Solid (KDE's library for interaction with the hardware). I guess the order is random. Making the devices sorted by name if the user did not customize the sort order in any way might be worth considering.
> We receive the list of devices from Solid (KDE's library for interaction > with the hardware). I guess the order is random. Making the devices sorted > by name if the user did not customize the sort order in any way might be > worth considering. Thanks for considering this possibility, this would be great. > We never had any way to sort the devices by name. I don't see how we lose an > advantage if we continue to not have one. I agree, although I did not mean that this specific option was a loss (since indeed it was never part of KDE). My comment was more general: KDE has always been very efficient both for home users and for more demanding users who required e.g. network-oriented features (network-aware DCOP, network transparency via kio slaves, remote sessions, etc.) There seems to be a trend to focus more on home users (some KDE applications do not use network kio slaves, many do not work correctly over ssh), not only within KDE but also within the wider GNU/Linux community (e.g. Wayland does not seem to include the network capabilities of X). I meant that this general trend corresponds to a loss in features that were an advantage of GNU/Linux over Windows or MacOS. Anyway, thank you for the wonderful work.
Right now the order is basically random. We will fix that in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367614 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 367614 ***