Configure languages for desktop in the shell?

[Duncan]

Dennis Knorr posted on Wed, 28 Dec 2022 10:48:03 +0100 as excerpted:

> Hello,
> i want to configure the desktop language not in system settings, but in
> the shell, is this possible?
> 
> More precisely, i want to add 2 languages, and set another one (not
> english/american) as the top one for language, format, konsole, time and
> so on.
> 
> Is there a possibility to do that?

A general answer that will hopefully point you in the right direction if 
nobody has an answer more specific to your situation...

While I'm (effectively) English mono-lingual and haven't needed to deal 
with L10N much personally so my experience there is limited, I've found 
the kde admin guide very helpful in other areas, and expect it should be 
in this area for those who need it as well.  (That said, much of this was 
originally written for kde3 or earlier and updated for kde4 and kde/
plasma5, so keep that in mind and for instance emphasize the newer XDG 
spec locations that kde/plasma5 and certainly the upcoming 6 are likely to 
use, over the older kde-specific ones from the 3 era, with 4 starting to 
transition to XDG but leaning toward the old ones and 5 mostly 
transitioned to XDG but with a few untransitioned exceptions.)

https://userbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration

Plus some general observations:

1) KDE's config is (almost) entirely text-based, generally ini-style, so 
provided you can find the file (which the above admin guide should help 
with, that and a bit of hands-on experimentation has always done it for 
me), it's pretty much a given that you can text-edit it from the shell/
text-editor/script.

2) I /believe/ (with the initial caveat above...) that for the 
unconfigured user case, kde should default to system L10N defaults as set 
in the usual $LANG, $LANGUAGE, etc, environmental vars.  So if it's a case 
of just setting initial defaults that a user can reconfigure from later if 
desired, I'd be /quite/ surprised if (barring the occasional bug) just 
setting those correctly didn't "just work".

3) Of course the kiosk mode discussed in the admin guide can (often) be 
used to prevent user modification of settings if that's desired, as well.  
(Again the caveat, but doubled in this case since I've neither l10n nor 
kiosk-mode-naildown experience.  I only know of kiosk mode from seeing it 
in the admin guide.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman