KDE 4 vs 5, regional settings and dolphin

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

Not sure whether this is the best place to ask but here goes:

I'm running a selection of KF5 applications installed in a parallel prefix (/opt/local) on a Kubuntu 14.04 system. Mostly this works fine; "Konsole5" is just a bit better than Konsole4, KDevelop5 quite a bit more by now than Kdevelop4 etc.

There are some strange things with regional settings though, like the KCMs which for the most part ignore my language choice despite the fact that translations are available in the appropriate place under /opt/local where other KF5 code finds them.

FWIW, I'm living in France (read: continental West Europe), want my computers to communicate in English with me, and insist that this be European English as used in the EU (= en_GB). Evidently I do not want imperial units or pounds as the monetary unit.

My question concerns other regional settings, esp. time/date formatting. Under KDE4, the translations KCM had detailed settings for just about every aspect, making it possible to override the usual ways of doing things for a given locale. I've always configured my desktops (MSWin, Mac & Unix/Linux) to use no thousands separator, 24h time and a short date format of the form YYYYMMDD. I cannot find how to achieve that with the KF5 KCMs, it seems one can only pick the locale that approaches the desired settings as closely as possible, for each category.

If true that's a serious regression, no matter how few users actually bother to complain about it. IMVHO, of course.

But what's even stranger/worse is that my choice isn't respected by Dolphin5. I've set my a number of locales including for date to "Malta (en_GB)" because that approaches closest what I want, but Dolphin5 seems to use a US format for the short date (MM/DD/YYYY instead of the expected DD/MM/YYYY).

Why is this, and why isn't it enough to copy the appropriate settings from ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals to ~/.config/kdeglobals? I would have expected that the actual settings still exist in file config files, even without a GUI to configure things in detail. The keys certainly still exist in ~/.config/kdeglobals.

And FWIW: Dolphin5 does behave as intended/desired on my Mac where my MacPorts ports allow me to install the KDE4 and KF5 versions into the same prefix, and despite the lack of a running Plasma shell.

Thanks,
R.

PS: In case someone feels obliged to point out that we Mac users already have a file "explorer" called the Finder: please google FTFF before voicing that concern and rest assured I rarely actually use Dolphin on OS X ;)