When choosing Shutdown, Restart or Logout etc. a dialog with a count-down appears which has a row with two buttons. I noticed that the order of the buttons - for the Shutdown dialog currently "Cancel", "Shutdown" - seems to be inconsistent with the rest of the Plasma dialog button order. Shouldn't it be "Shutdown", "Cancel"?
I think you're right. but I'm also worried that swapping them is going to cause chaos to everyone with muscle memory of always clicking the right one.
(People coming from KDE4 won't have a problem: this is how the shutdown confirmation button looked there: http://www.hecticgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Shutdown-confirmation-dialog-screenshot-in-KDE-4.3.jpg)
I added Thomas from VDG. I think it is good to clear this topic early before the current order really burns in; as more and more people are going to use Plasma 5 instead of 4.
wrong Thomas ;-P But I can provide the information that in general the button order is controlled by QStyle::SH_DialogButtonLayout, providing QDialogButtonBox::ButtonLayout being one of QDialogButtonBox::WinLayout QDialogButtonBox::MacLayout QDialogButtonBox::KdeLayout QDialogButtonBox::GnomeLayout I'd say that *any* dialog should follow that (ie. in doubt copy the logic from QDialogButtonBox) - you implicitly click wrong buttons (for a while) after changing the order. Cancel/Ok is a typical OSX/Gnome layout while KDE largely copied the Windows layout patterns (Ok/Cancel) --- On a personal note, the windows layout is rubbish. The buttons are on the right side of buttonboxes (right aligned) and the OSX theory is that of a ltr culture walking top-left -> bottom-right (that's why the close button is on the top left and cancel buttons are on the left - you "go back to where thou camest" while the ok/apply/accept buttons ideally appear on the bottom right (signing the changes) tl;dr - the buttons should seriously be consistent (changing that pattern makes you click the wrong button easily, I notice that when changing the stylehint) but the default KDE layout is the wrong one ;-P
Gregor and Thomas L. are right. David's concern is legitimate, but keeping a wrong behavior intact because people may have gotten used to it is not the way to go. If anybody complains about us fixing the wrong behavior, we can always say "sorry for screwing up before, but we just fixed the wrong behavior now, sorry for making you re-train your hand". And please use QStyle::SH_DialogButtonLayout, to determine the order. Of course Plasma is always "KDE", but if we maybe change the standard layout for KDE at some point or make it user-configurable, these dialogs would still follow the rest of Plasma and KDE applications.
There's an all-new logout screen design in 5.8 which only has a centered Cancel button.