I’m physically located in Poland, bu US English is my preferred language. My OS language is US English (installed as such). I have everything set to American English in the Region & Language settings, except Measurements and Paper Size (changing these makes no difference).
Yet, months and days of the week show in Polish across the entire system, everywhere. I need to change this but I can’t find how. This drives me bonkers.
It’s not my experience on Fedora - the System Settings app works fine to change the settings. (You often need to log out and restart the session, but you’ve done that by restarting the PC.)
I don’t know whether something else is going on in Kubuntu.
Is there a file at /etc/default/locale or /etc/locale.conf that has systemwide settings?
Now, I wonder if there is a way to change the time display in Dolphin to YYYY/MM/DD.
Edit:
I gathered that there used to be a setting to change Dolphin time display in Plasma 4 but it was removed….
So, there is no way to customize date and time display? This is massively disappointing, if true. I could change the time display to Japanese, they use the YYYY/MM/DD format but that will also change the date language.
I wish there was a way to customize date and time independently from each other and independently from the system langue, like in…. Windows.
Nice! Thank you. Didn’t know there was “Swedish English” setting. I know most Swedes are fluent in English and generally very cool people, so that’s why they use my fav date format
I’ve been using en_SE for years, but since July an update that regenerates locales causes locale errors. A solution that works until the next regeneration is given by this gist.
KDE generally has the assumption that locale follows region and language, that everyone in a region speaking a language gets the same settings. #$%#@%. So, we can't just choose the date format we want, we have resort to **kludges** like setting en_SE. I was told once that it was a Qt thing, and that KDE can't fix it. When I last looked the available locales were **hard-coded** ^&$^%$ into Qt, and I wasn't allowed to use my own.
There are many bilingual (or tri, or…) people in the world who live as expats or work in other countries and need locales that are different from their geo location. This is 2025.
Even Windows lets you tweak date and time independently from each other and from system language and locale.
We’re talking about two different things here. Two wrong assumptions, but they’re made in different places:
The wrong assumption that locale is derivable from geolocation. This is the problem you suffered from here, but it’s not generic to Linux or to KDE. (As you noted, it was an issue for you on Kubuntu but not on Fedora. Based on the Stack Exchange post we looked at, it’s probably an Ubuntu installer issue.)
The wrong assumption that “micro-locale” (date format etc) is derivable from “macro-locale” (language and region), which is what @jlittle is getting at. For example, the assumption that everyone who uses UK English uses DD/MM/YYYY formats in their work. Most normies do, but many techies / accountants / lawyers etc prefer YYYY-MM-DD. The misassumption that macro-locale drives micro-locale can’t accommodate the idea that users of the same language+region would use different date formats, so like @jlittle says, we end up with kludges where instead of just being able to stipulate “my preferred date format is YYYY-MM-DD”, we create fictions like “for the purposes of date format, my preferred language is English as spoken in Sweden”. So even though LC_TIME can be specified separately from LANG, then if there’s no language+region which has my desired date and time format, there’s no way of expressing my preference for that format. Currently you and I get away with it because our preference (YYYY-MM-DD for numerical dates, 24-hour clock, and English names for months and days) has been kludged into the kind of fictional en_SE locale[1].
Unfortunately (2) is quite prevalent, not only in the way Linux works but for example the way JS works across platforms. (This is why Firefox will ignore your preferred date format even when the OS lets you set it - including on Windows.) It seems heavily baked in in many areas and I’m not sure how one would go about dismantling it.
Yeah, I know, I just didn’t put this in words quite so clearly as you did.
Ultimately, all of these should be independently customizable, not tied in to the locale at all. I’m bilingual, I live in Poland, so I prefer the metric system and a 24 hour clock, but I prefer US English for the entire UI and YYYY-MM-DD for the date. Yeah, Ima nerd, I’ve used this format since I can remember. I met many people back at work who in the US also used it.
What is surprising and upsetting is that I expected this level of customization from Linux. Especially from KDE as Plasma and Dolphin are known for extreme customization. Not having this in KDE is mind blowing. Windows could do this since at least Windows XP. Actually, the control panel that does this in Windows 11 is the ol’ school, ugly Windows XP control panel. There are few apps and settings that ignore some of this but most the UX/UI in Win 11 does this properly.
Yes, I have these issues elsewhere. The biggest is that most websites and even a lot of software default to Polish UI, despite the fact that my OS Language is US English. Steam is one of the worst, it insists on spellchecking in Polish and serving videos with Polish sountrack so typing on Steam forums was an exercise in frustration until someone found a way to hack Steam dictionaries because Steam support didn’t care. This is beyond stupid. There are like 200,000 Americans and over a million other nationalities living in Poland and I’m sure other countries are like that.
Yeah, as far as date format goes, I think I had fewer problems in Windows.
Though Windows has its own “locale” quirks (e.g. if you try using UK English as your system language but a US English keyboard layout, Windows tends to unpredictably add back the UK keyboard layout that you intentionally removed).
There are limits to what KDE can do here, because generally applications don’t go via the desktop environment to do formatting. They use the locale functionality in glibc which is a very generic Linux component. (Actually, I’m not sure how Qt and GTK interact here, but they are also out of KDE’s control.)
This is partly why Windows has an advantage - it’s all under MS’s control: desktop environment, the OS’s formatting APIs and the whole lot.
That said though, it might be useful for Dolphin to allow you to specify a custom date format, like the Plasma clock widget does (I could make the clock on the panel say 2025~~10##04!!! if I wanted to). That obviously is something that KDE could implement.
Exactly. I use that widget and I have it set up the way I want it. Well, except for that unwanted pipe divider that was supposed to be fixed in June or July
I don’t really understand how all of this works under the hood so I just expected to be able to customize this everywhere, if a widget can do this.
To fix this “properly”, I think KDE would need to create a UI for people to customize their formats that would create a glibc locale under the hood, and then Qt folks would need to re-do QLocale to use glibc locales directly, so that all Qt-based software would use the custom locale that you created with the KDE UI.
However it’s not clear to me from the Qt bug reports that the Qt folks even want that; they seem interested in remaining with the existing CLDR and ICU-based implementation, which implies that no upstream fix is actually possible here.
Given that… […]
At this point I think it’s worth considering. The challenge is that it would be a ridiculous amount of work.
Maybe we could reach out to the Qt folks to see if there are any small changes to QLocale they’d be willing to accept so we don’t have to port away from it. Like maybe there could be an optional “only use glibc locales” mode to unblock a custom glibc locale creation UI. Or a way to create custom Qt-specific locales so at least we could create custom locales that would work in all KDE and Qt apps.
Oh… wow, 2014? So there isn’t much hope, I suppose. But it’s good to see that there are others who need this.
Yeah, but… I’m still on Windows. Every six months for the last three years or so I embark on a quest to test a bunch of distros and find my future OS as I think the clock is ticking for Windows.
Every time my quest ends with a death of a thousand cuts. There is not one, single, glaring issue with Linux, but a high number of smaller ones and some can be quite infuriating. At one time I had a list, there were tens/dozens and most didn’t have a solution or have been discussed for years, like this one, or under development, like Wayland. Then new issues crop up with each major update.
I realize this will require some major compromises and trade-offs but I also learn and each time I find workarounds and fixes and each time I feel like I’m inching closer but it’s easy to get discouraged.
Huge THANK YOU 
