On 09/08/2019 01.39, gumb wrote:
Left this alone for 48 hours because it's driving me insane. It doesn't make sense. I've been running with openSUSE with pretty much the same settings (i.e. English UK as primary language, French sometimes only as secondary keyboard layout and with language support in software that provides it). For years across many versions I've had no issue, it behaves as I expect it to. Now I've got an incomprehensible mishmash of English and French.
...
Show the output of % locale and % sudo locale
Not in a position to copy the output from the other machine to this old one I'm typing on yet. It's a mixture of EN_GB and FR. See end of this message.
We need seeing it, both root and your user. Do not use ssh to get it, because the ssh can have a different one. Besides than "sudo locale", I would like: locale su - locale ...
The main YaST menu is in French, whilst most individual configuration dialogs are in English. I get French messages in Konsole (user and root) despite the interface being in English. Firefox's interface also in French. Yet in Plasma System Settings -> Regional Settings -> Language, I have British English at the top of the Preferred Languages box, followed by American English, and français in third position underneath.
You possibly have several problems. One, KDE handling of language, which controls the interface language. Is it English? Two, messages in French inside Konsole. This is controlled by "locale", so you have to run that command inside Konsole and paste for us to see. Third, if in a program, say YaST, you see parts in French, parts in English, it is because the translations are incomplete or deprecated, which makes the program revert to English USA, not UK (actually, English UK is handled as another translation, ie, another language). This is handled on single message basis, not the entire program. In the same screen it is possible to have this mixture - and the solution for this is to report as translation bug. This issue does not apply to big programs such as Mozilla or LibreOffice, that have a separate translation package for each language. ...
Effectively, the only things my system's got to go on in suspecting my French preferences are my selection of French timezone, and my preferred French formats for numbers, time, paper, money and measurement. Oh, and a switchable keyboard layout. At what point has the system decided, 'yep, he definitely wants half of his apps to be in French too, despite him explicitly telling us to pick English'? After my last changes to the Formats and another relogin, Firefox has now decided to switch back to English. But why? I changed FORMATS, not LANGUAGE. This is utterly nonsensical.
Re Firefox/Thunderbird, you may be affected by an unsolved bug related to locale - but apparently only the time/date display. Looking at Thunderbird setup, go to advanced, General, date and time formatting. It can be "application locale" or "regional settings locale". The later is problematic. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.0 x86_64 at Telcontar)