Xfce Forum

Asterisk

Member

Registered: 2014-05-19

Posts: 1

Base-2 vs. Base-10 file sizes in XFCE

I'm currently in the process of switching from Windows to Linux as my primary desktop OS, and XFCE is my desktop environment of choice; like many others, I've decided to go with XFCE because of its low overhead and especially its adherence to well-established UI conventions in light of many other DEs' increasing divergence from users' expectations.

However, the one thing that's been bothering me significantly as I go about configuring XFCE to my liking is that I can't seem to find any option displaying file sizes system-wide in traditional base-2 units.  I understand that the GNOME team has decided to begin displaying all filesizes with decimal units, but this decision seems consistent with the sort of forceful and presumptuous decisions that they have been making with respect to many other questions, and so is part of the overall pattern of behavior that's inspired many people to select XFCE over GNOME.  So it's a bit surprising that the same problem is showing up here.

I don't want to get too deep into the whole SI-vs.-IEC prefixes debate (my argument: 30-40 years of established convention is the standard and should be treated as such; the byte is not an SI unit, and SI has nothing to do with measuring file sizes, so the 'confusion' between SI prefixes and data-storage prefixes is irrelevant; there's no reason to ever use decimal-denominated units to measure data), but suffice to say that, regardless of one's opinion, it's still frustrating to see decimal units appear to be hard-coded into XFCE generally and Thunar in particular, and it causes much more confusion than it solves: it creates inconsistencies between file-size reporting on the command line and in the GUI, and it creates inconsistencies in file-size reporting between OSes.

Is there indeed some option that I'm missing to restore binary file-size reporting in XFCE generally or Thunar specifically?  If not, are there any patches that change the hardcoded filesize denomination?

BTW, I think the best approach to dealing with this is the one used by the FileZilla FTP client, which allows the user to select whatever preferred notation they desire: