GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 666924
Global setting for the date and time format
Last modified: 2012-11-08 13:35:56 UTC
I find it a bit of a flaw that there is no global setting in the gnome-control-center for the date and time format. It's configured by the regional settings. I like my desktop to be in English (US) but I'm Dutch. So I don't like AM/PM time formats and slashes in the time format in the US regional formats. There is an option to alter the time format of the gnome-shell. But once that is set to a 24 hour clock all the other programs such as Empathy and Evolution are still using the US formats (PM/AM). It's a big hassle to setup Evolution the way I want it. I've to change the date and time format in more or less 4 places in the configuration menu. In Empathy there is no setting for this. This shouldn't be necessary. My suggestion to enhance the flexibility and usability of Gnome is to add a global setting to the "Region and Language" settings in the gnome-control-center. This enables the Gnome desktop to be more flexible. It also reduces the steps to configure the desktop. The global setting should affect all Gnome applications and if possible also non-Gnome apps such as Firefox. I like to hear your input or suggestions.
The default should be based on what you entered when you set up / installed your distribution. Which GNOME version is this about?
Okay, but what if I want the English language and the Dutch regional settings? This is also the case by the way. I want the Euro currency, metric units, a 24 hours clock notation in all Gnome apps and a date notation like this: dd-mm-yyyy, also in all Gnome apps. But I do want the English (US) language for personal reasons. I find the English language more compatible with technical terms. Or what if my desktop is used by a myriad of internationals and therefor it has the need for numerous regional combinations? This is why I miss these settings, there is no flexibility. If the settings are based upon my installation setup then I can only change it by a re-installation? This is not very practical. I use Debian Testing with a mixture of Gnome 3.0.x and Gnome 3.2.x. Most of it is already Gnome 3.2.x. A global setting for all the regional settings would be superb. It could resemble the one in LibreOffice. This would give the user more control over the settings in the user profile. And if all kinds of people want to create a profile with their own regional settings then this would be possible. Without altering the base system. Only the profiles would be changed.
As you can see in the designs at: http://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/RegionAndLanguage#Guidelines one is supposed to be able to change the various formats on a more fine-grained basis.
I see, Debian hasn not implemented these upgrades yet. I still have the 3.0.x layout. I tried these settings in a OpenSUSE virtualmachine and the settings do look very good. They are also applied globaly. I do regred that I now have the Dutch date and day names in an English desktop. I would like to have the English dates and names. But that's just a whish. I will close this bug. The settings in 3.2 do what I wanted it to do. I do hope that it might have more tweak options. So that I can configure the date and day names to English. Thanks!
The designs aren't implemented... Feel free to reopen the bug if you actually want to see it fixed...
Alright, I'm curious if this is really getting solved. It would be very nice! For the record. The system locales can be changed, I know that and it works great! But it would be more configurable if it would be possible to customize the locales more. For say I want to have the Dutch locales but because my desktop is in the English language I would like to have the names of the day in English.
There's now a working "region" selection. The problem now is the granularity of the selection. Bug 682928 deals specifically with your problem (having LC_TIME follow the display language rather than the region selection), so dup'ing it there. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 682928 ***