Arch Linux

HvO

Member

Registered: 2026-04-10

Posts: 1

Cannot change language in Gnome settings

I run Gnome with English for language and German for formatting. A few weeks ago (still Gnome 49) this broke. It affects multiple systems an all my users.

When the problems began, the language setting (Gnome settings category "region and language" for the user) had jumped from their original setting en_IE to en_US. On some systems switching this setting back and forth returned the desktop to English. But for one user this does not work. The language remains German. Furthermore the system ask upon every login to rename the user folders to German. Setting the "do no ask again" checkbox does not help.

For this user I started to fumble around with setting environment variables (with no avail, probably making things worse).

In my .zshrc I already had:

export LANGUAGE="en_US"

I add a `~/.config/environment.d/1_locale.conf`:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en

---

> locale -a

C
C.utf8
de_DE.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_US.utf8
POSIX

> localectl

System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
               LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
               LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
               LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
               LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
               LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
    VC Keymap: de
   X11 Layout: de,de
  X11 Variant: nodeadkeys,deadgraveacute