Re: KDE Plasma - switching to English does not work

18 Feb 2021

      Simon Becherer wrote:
...
Check if you have the file:
.config/KDE/Sonnet.conf
take a look inside. at my system here are some apps who ignore settings defined.
and maybe use a tool like bleachbit to delete a lot of cached files
for kde/plasma.
backup the .cache directory before, this could change some settings!!!
.config/KDE/Sonnet.conf had some program entries in ignore_de= and ignore_de_DE=. I cleaned this file and now I have:
[General]
autodetectLanguage=false
backgroundCheckerEnabled=true
checkUppercase=true
checkerEnabledByDefault=false
defaultClient=
defaultLanguage=en_US
ignore_de=
ignore_de_DE=
preferredLanguages=en_US, de_DE
skipRunTogether=true

For testing I created a new user. This user has a correct en_US setup. Unfortunately copying the config files from this user does not help.

.config/plasma-localerc:
LANG=en_US.utf8

.i18n
#
# Override system wide input method here
#

# export INPUT_METHOD=scim

# Most applications support several languages for their output.
# To make use of this feature, simply uncomment one of the lines below or
# add your own one (see /usr/share/locale/locale.alias for more codes)
# This overwrites the system default set in /etc/sysconfig/language
# in the variable RC_LANG.
#
#export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8        # uncomment this line for German output
#export LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8        # uncomment this line for French output
#export LANG=es_ES.UTF-8        # uncomment this line for Spanish output

.config/KDE/Sonnet.conf: does not exists for the new user

Cleaning caches with bleachbit was a good idea, but I cleaned the KDE caches with bleachbit and still have the problems.

The main problem is still, that KDE seems to modify the languages variabled, especially $LANGUAGE, incorrectly.

In Konsole $LANGUAGE is de:en_US:en_US:de. This means, that "de" messages have priority.

I looked up the source code:
plasma-workspace-5.21.0/startkde/startplasma.cpp
[...]
void runStartupConfig()
{
     // export LC_* variables set by kcmshell5 formats into environment
     // so it can be picked up by QLocale and friends.
     KConfig config(QStringLiteral("plasma-localerc"));
     KConfigGroup formatsConfig = KConfigGroup(&config, "Formats");

     const auto lcValues = {"LANG", "LC_NUMERIC", "LC_TIME", "LC_MONETARY", "LC_MEASUREMENT", "LC_COLLATE", "LC_CTYPE"};
     for (auto lc : lcValues) {
         const QString value = formatsConfig.readEntry(lc, QString());
         if (!value.isEmpty()) {
             qputenv(lc, value.toUtf8());
         }
     }

     KConfigGroup languageConfig = KConfigGroup(&config, "Translations");
     const QString value = languageConfig.readEntry("LANGUAGE", QString());
     if (!value.isEmpty()) {
         qputenv("LANGUAGE", value.toUtf8());
     }

     if (!formatsConfig.hasKey("LANG") && !qEnvironmentVariableIsEmpty("LANG")) {
         formatsConfig.writeEntry("LANG", qgetenv("LANG"));
         formatsConfig.sync();
     }
}
[...]

To variables LANGUAGE, LANG and the LC_* variables are read from .config/plasma-localerc and non-empty variables are set as environment variables. In reality .config/plasma-localerc configured in system settings with English as first language and German as second language (as suggested in the bug reports)

[Translations]
LANGUAGE=en_US:de

from .config/plasma-localerc results in LANGUAGE=de:en_US:en_US:de (in Konsole) and LANGUAGE=en_US:de (in gnome-terminal). So probably Konsole does extra processing of $LANGUAGE. But even gnome-terminal (in KDE desktop) behaves incorrectly.

Both terminals do only show German messages:
myuser@myuser:~> rm does-not-exists
rm: das Entfernen von 'does-not-exists' ist nicht möglich: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden

"strace" shows, that "rm does-not-exists" searches messages in this sequence (first: en_US, second: de - but en_US has no translation files):
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES
/usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/SYS_LC_MESSAGES
/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
/usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
/usr/share/locale-langpack/en/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
/usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
/usr/share/locale-langpack/de/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo

The last file exists and that's why the message is German.

In theory the solution would be to set LANGUAGE=en_US (without "de") or unsetting $LANGUAGE. Doing this in .i18 or .bashrc solves the problem for the terminal. UI programs started from KDE still have incorrect language.

Greetings,
Björn

Re: KDE Plasma - switching to English does not work

Bjoern Voigt