Can you change file size measurements from KiB/MiB/GiB(base2) to KB/MB/GB(base10)?

I have gone through all the settings and I don’t see an option to change. Is this possible? If not, is there a plugin for KDE that will do base10?

Thanks!

Currently you cannot change this in KDE Plasma:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364321

4 Likes

The base 10 file size measurement does not really exist in practice, apart from some niche use cases (mostly when hard drive manufacturers misleadingly advertise the capacity of their drives). The only problem is that most people are used to the wrong units, mainly thanks to the Micro$oft operating systems – so when you see in windoze 10 kilobytes, that’s actually 10 kibibytes, i.e. 10240 bytes. It’s not 10000 bytes, as it should be.

2 Likes

Some command line utilities have option --si which does something similar.
For example, programs like

  • ls
  • df
  • du

and probably a few more.

I agree. As unfamiliar a gibibyte may sound, at least it’s unambiguous and a gibibyte has always a value of 10243. A gigabyte may be 10003 or 10243 depending on whether you are looking at a hard drive advertisement or a Windows file size.

1 Like

Thank you to you all for replying! I sincerely appreciate it. It isn’t a huge deal, I thought it might be a setting but I can work around it. Thanks again!