Hello!
The title may sound repetitive, but it’s not. Believe me…
After countless attempts, I’ve given up and come here to ask for help, or in this case, to ask for a development for the Plasma settings. I think I’ve tried every mix of regions (locale)…
Allow us to create personalised regional settings, just as we can do in the shell with locales (i18n), where we can simply edit the locale files to make a better representation of dates, times, numbers, etc.
With the exception of North Americans, nobody likes imperial system, nobody uses American-style dates and times… However, many prefer the English language, simply because it sounds better and is easier in the IT world.
I can customise my shell locales according to my preferences, but I can’t do that on my lovely desktop environment - Plasma (I still call it KDE).
My suggestion/request:
- Make Plasma use the system files /usr/share/i19n/locale
or
- Leave all QT files relating to locales in text mode, and not in binary mode, so that we can change them as we can the system ones (/usr/share/i19n/locale).
or
- Add an option in the Regional Settings to enter customised formats
Here’s an example of how I like it (just because it’s easier to read/use):
Time: HH:MM:SS (24 hours)
Date: YYYY-MM-DD
Numbers: 1,234.56 (for negatives -1.234,56)
Currency: 1.234,56 € (for negatives -1.234,56 €)
Thank you advance.
Best regards,
Carlos
1 Like
I too would like proper internationalization support. The last time I looked KDE was hamstrung by Qt, insisting that times and dates are the same for a given region and language. So KDE now has hundreds of region/language combinations, and you have to hope that one of them suits.
1 Like
+1 here
I just installed Gentoo with KDE, and successfully wrote a custom en_FR.UTF-8 glibc locale, but I couldn’t manage to make KDE use it or an equivalent one in case it doesn’t use glibc’s ones. The real problem being that each time I specify for example “British English” language + custom formats for time etc, Konsole ends up overwriting my en_FR.UTF-8 locale I wish to (at least) use in terminals.
Otherwise i’m fine having a combination of language + custom formats for e.g. dates, currencies, etc
Maybe QT doesn’t think linux is not “Linux Is Not UniX” enough. Multiple bug reports on this in the QT’s tracker. A 2017 comment from QT, in a naive interpretation, essentially amounts to QT’s mainly targeting application development rather than desktop environment or operating system development, so instead of QT’s changing the API to accept a handful of custom locale formatting strings (which is the way to go), Plasma should stand up if it’s more than an application and parse langinfo itself for QLocale to use it, since Windows and MacOS are already doing it for themselves in a CLDR-compatible (Common Locale Data Repository) way. A 2024 comment from QT even talks about “The Free World”. Strange stuff in the programming world these days :]
You can try System Settings > Region & Language > Time > Modify: "English (South Africa)", which corresponds to the en_ZA.UTF-8 locale, and uses the format “Saturday, 25 May 2024 17:31:38 GMT+3 | 2024/05/25 17:31”. If a short date format that facilitates sorting isn’t preferred, “English (Denmark)” can be selected, which corresponds to the en_DK.UTF-8 locale, and uses the format “Saturday, 25 May 2024 17:31:38 GMT+3 | 25/05/2024 17:31”. “English (Switzerland)”, which corresponds to the en_CH.UTF-8 locale, and uses the format “Saturday, 25 May 2024 17:31:38 GMT+3 | 25.05.2024 17:31”, is the only locale that uses the period character as the delimiter in the date, although it isn’t a standard locale installed by the glibc package on Arch Linux and the glibc-locale-source package on Fedora Linux.