Since KDE Plasma 4 on Ubuntu, Arch & Fedora I have set my language to “English (Australia)”, it always showed me the correct spelling (colour instead of color) and showed me Australian Dollar instead of British Pounds or kilometres over the American miles.
Updated recently to Plasma 6.6.5 and now it states en_AU is not supported. It now shows me US spellings, conversions and measurements. I set it to UK and manually changed all the other options to Australian but programs don’t respect this and show me everything UK ratios because the language is set to en_UK. LibreOffice being a prime example.
Can we please re-add English (Australia)/en-AU as this destroys usability with horrible UX design and makes Plasma unusable in Australia. Why it was removed in the first place is beyond me.
I’ve done this and now KDE complains that English Australia isn’t supported and now everything is in United States which is horrid because they spell everything poorly, this is on Fedora 44. Fedora 43 KDE worked with en-AU but Fedora 44 KDE no longer does but Fedora itself officially supports English Australia and it’s even discoverable under /usr/*/locale/. Going by chat.fedora project .org and research I’ve done this seems to be due to the fact KDE doesn’t support it.
When you say “we need to fix this” what needs to be fixed as I have a lot of writing to do that’s due tomorrow afternoon and all of my writing software is borked due to this (incorrect conversions and now currently spelling is horrid as setting LANG options to en_AU forces to US) so I would like to fix this myself instead of waiting for a fix. 15 years using Plasma and I’ve never had to fix my language and locale. It’s always worked so why it doesn’t anymore is weird. I don’t even remember Windows XP being this difficult with locale settings.
One point - if we’re talking about LibreOffice, it has its own locale settings, and “English (Australia)” is available there, even if it isn’t in Plasma.
I myself use English (Canada) in order to get YYYY-MM-DD as the default date format in LibreOffice Calc, even though it’s not an available language in Plasma.
if we’re talking about LibreOffice, it has its own locale settings, and “English (Australia)” is available there, even if it isn’t in Plasma.
Thank you @pg-tips however this is just one program I need correct locale and language settings for. I can’t reasonably do this for all programs on all of my computers.
I’ve asked around to where I can help officially port en-AU to Plasma but I’ve waited long enough for someone to respond, KDE has so many platforms to contribute on I don’t know where to search for this sort of thing. I’ve given up and now I’m experimenting with LXQt and Mate/Gnome. It’s a shame as I fallen in love with Plasma but considering I have found articles and posts complaining about this dating back to 2009, I’m not hopeful this is something the core KDE developers find important.
Thanks for that mate, I’ll check this out as I still really dislike post version 2 Gnome and would prefer to be back on Plasma. I’ll see if I can fix en-AU myself, if it is out of my scope I’ll send an email.
Because there’s no “Australian English” translation effort in KDE, it doesn’t appear on this page. And due to a faulty set of assumptions on this System Settings page, being unable to choose it as your language using this UI results in LANG not being set to en_AU.UTF-8.
Can you make your ~/.config/plasma-localerc file look like this:
[Formats]
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
If you make the contents of the file look like that and then restart the computer, I believe it should resolve the problem. But before we continue, can you confirm that it does? My expectation is that this solves the problem for everything outside of the login screen.
This is what it is set as when you update from the version in Fedora 43 to 44. It defaults to en-US due to lack of support in Plasma. I don’t know why, apparently it’s not suppose to do this according to someone on a matrix server for Linux, but it does.
I’ve given up trying to reach out and resolve this so I’ve migrated to Mate. Only so much time I can waste on either finding support or attempting to contribute and fix myself. I need to use my computer and this made in impossible to do anything productive.
I know Plasma development in mostly volunteer based but I’ve been going back and forth on so many different KDE dev/support platforms and mailinglists to help resolve this but alas no one response within a reasonable timeframe for an issue this important, get told to do stuff I’ve already mentioned I’ve tried or get told to “get good and tell my college teachers to ‘get stuffed’ for marking down due to US spelling”. That’s not how the real world works, people depend on their systems and issues like this should be remedied asap.
There have been posts on on here open for two months relating to this. People have been complaining about en-AU on Plasma since 2009, even the fact that it uses to work for others but not work for some is suspicious and puts into question the stability of the code. I don’t wanna come of as a hater, I loved using Plasma for as long as I did but an issue like this is seriously concerning.
I’m willing to run Plasma in a VM to troubleshot and diagnose issues to help out but I am not currently in a position to do a re-install of my OS for another time. I have to much going on and need my machines fumctional.
Me too. I have vague recollections of this during the installation of Kubuntu. But i changed everything (except the language - because i couldn’t) after the installation.
The spelling doesn’t matter so much for me - British English spelling is ok. But when locale is ignored, that’s annoying. For example, even though Locale is set to Australia, LibreOffice Calc defaults to UK English, because that’s the language. It doesn’t seem to query the locale. (My LibreOffice is Flatpak, if that matters?)
That’s ok for me, if it’s just one app. But it’s not the best situation.
For what it’s worth, Australian English spelling is almost the same as British English. I’ve heard (i don’t know if it’s true) that the Australian English dictionaries can include both British and American spelling for many words - because younger Australians, particularly since the internet era, have been heavily influenced by American television, movie and internet culture.
While many Australians are happy enough to use either British English or American English dictionaries, it doesn’t properly work when the locale is messed up. The British predominantly (but not exclusively) gives the wrong currency, the American gives almost everything wrong, from page size, to date format, to measurements to.. omg, when metric?!
I’m running Ultramarine KDE 43 (Fedor based) on two different computers and 42 on another. They’re all up to KDE 6.6.5 as well. All have the options for Australian English. I also checked Libre Office and they’re set to Aussie as well.
You wouldn’t happen to have your keyboard layout set to something like UK by any chance? I know that can play around with local settings.
If i recall correctly (Kubuntu 26.04), there was no ability to select AU keyboard (unlike ZorinOS, which i also use), so US was selected. UK Keyboard layout is different. AU keyboard is identical to US keyboard. It makes a bit of a mess of selections:
