I've been testing this and I think I'm firmly 👎 on this.

My major problem with it is that System Settings is nearly always a linear workflow. I open something and then I'm done with it and the next time I open it, I almost certainly want to navigate somewhere completely different.

So what ends up happening is that I spend extra time navigating back home before I get to go to the place I want.

Maybe some kind of middle ground could be a timeout where we restore settings within the last 5 minutes (or something really tight like that) or at most in the same session? This would probably cover the case where you've changed something and then decided to immediately go back and change it again, but would be less likely to interrupt the case where you're navigating to a completely different setting.

I'd be interested in some user research to the contrary, but my inclination is that people don't typically change the same settings multiple times unless it's over a very short period of time or a very long period of time (in which case remembering the last used pane doesn't really help anyways)

@danrabbit hm, remembering a timestamp of last-closed and then only restoring if it's been less than an amount of time should be pretty trivial. I can give that a try with a short span of a few minutes.

@danrabbit alright, I've revisited this with a short one minute timeout. So if you're poking around at a setting, close Switchboard, and re-open within a minute, you get back to where you were. Otherwise, it retains the same behavior as today.

A minute seems pretty short to me, but it seemed like a sane starting point.

Okay, something I noticed while testing: it doesn't remember the sub-section you were on, which is annoying. I wonder if I can do something similar to your search results branch where it restores using the settings URL, though I don't think we have a way to know and save that in every plug… hrm.

I think having a (arbitrary) timeout introduces an element of unpredictability so I am -1 on that. In general you can keep the Settings window open if you are making a series of changes as they usually are applied straight away (or should be).

Doesn't look like this is going anywhere ... 2 👎 so far.