Improve Time Zone Selection During Installation

[shundhammer]

Improve Time Zone Selection During Installation

This is part of #903 (Make the installation process shorter).

In the installation workflow (#914), we have this time zone selection:

Problems

• The default is always wrong. For whatever weird reason, it defaults to New York / US Eastern Time (IIRC set from control.xml).

• All kinds of web pages find my approximate location by Geo-IP. Why can't we do the same, at least as the initial value?

• Usability is poor; you have to click very precisely, and that almost never works (see below).

• That level of detail isn't even needed for many users; almost all of Europe uses the same time zone, so it's pointless to locate the exact city.

[shundhammer]

Using a World Map

Back when we introduced this, this was more a marketing gag than improving usability. We had a huge discussion about it even back then (15+ years ago).

It's hard to find the correct location upon the first click. Due to the mercator projection of the map, a lot of screen space goes to vast areas of emptiness like Greenland and the Antarctic, but Europe is reduced to less than one square centimeter. Europeans mostly have to click once to zoom in and a second time to hit anywhere near their target location.

For Europe, that is pretty pointless since most European countries use the same time zone anyway.

Yes, there are combo boxes at the bottom where you can also select the time zone, but for one thing, that means selecting in two separate combo boxes (one for the region, one for the exact time zone), and the map is so dominant on the screen that it just screams "click me". Also, using a combo box involves a similar level of precise clicking just to open it plus scrolling plus reading plus selecting the correct item; and you have to do that in two separate combo boxes.

All in all, this is not a very pleasant experience, no matter if using the map or the combo boxes. As a user, I'd rather avoid that completely and just get a good default.

[shundhammer]

Geo-IP

Many web pages manage to locate the approximate location by the machine's IP address. That is surprisingly precise (no more than about 5 km off); a lot more precise than is needed for the purpose of selecting time zones.

Caveat

• This probably does not work if using a VPN; many commercial VPN providers offer it as a service to disguise your real location, so a geo IP will get the wrong location.

• If you live on a time zone border, this might not be precise enough. I recall on a USA trip we were visiting Columbus, Georgia which has US Eastern Time, but just crossing the river (in the same built-up area, i.e. you don't even realize you are crossing a state line) brings you to Phenix City, Alabama (not to confuse with Poenix, Arizona) which has US Central Time.

So, does this help at all?

IMHO yes; it doesn't make the time zone selection completely redundant, but it can provide a useful initial value.

[shundhammer]

Time Zone based on Language

For many languages, the language is typically sufficient to set the time zone: If you select any of Norwegian (Bokmal), Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Italian etc., the corresponding location and thus time zone is clear.

For others like English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, there are many time zones to choose from (surprisingly enough not for China which uses one single time zone despite the vast size of the country).

For some languages like German, there are some different countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), but they all use the same time zone.

So, does this help at all?

Yes, at least for a lot of cases. Not for all, though.

[roke-julian-lockhart]

@shundhammer, how could the user be using a VPN during initial installation of OpenSUSE?

Additionally, the language is most certainly not sufficient. If I were living in Finland, my language for my devices would remain English. That has been true for every foreigner that I have met, without exception.

[shundhammer]

@shundhammer, how could the user be using a VPN during initial installation of OpenSUSE?

Users get very creative with those things. We learned over the years decades (since 10/1999) that no installation scenario is too crazy; somebody will try it and find a way.

Additionally, the language is most certainly not sufficient. If I were living in Finland, my language for my devices would remain English. That has been true for every foreigner that I have met, without exception.

If you use English, you won't get the luxury solution; then you still have to make a manual selection. We don't optimize for the exceptional case, but for the normal case. And the normal case is that users set their native language and locale; even if it's just to avoid those insane English date formats like "Aug 2, 1973" instead of something with a logical order (YYYY-MM-DD or DD-MM-YYYY and for god's sake month numbers, not names).

Making the weird case the norm is what saddled us with that language / keyboard dialog and this time zone dialog where everybody has to fiddle around to click inside a few square millimeters and miss 95% of the time (while wasting most screen space with blue ocean that is irrelevant to the task at hand).

[shundhammer]

BTW Installation in a VPN is easier than you might think:

• You install into a VM while your VM host has a VPN active and routes all traffic through it.

• Your Internet router already sets up a VPN.

Combine that with any of those commercial VPNs that keep flooding YouTube, you might have selected a bogus location and get Vladivostok or Swaziland time. Or if it's your company's VPN, you'll probably get your company's headquarters' time zone somewhere across the globe.

[shundhammer]

Related Bugs

• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=973218
• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1211227