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French native speaker here. UX consistency, shared Internet culture, habits from the early 90's and error messages I can actually find on the Web are the reasons why I always set my computing to the english language.

I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that.

On the French-language mandatory corporate Windows laptop, Excel formulas are translated in French - so when searching for recipes on the web I have to translate them !

I enjoy sites such as Thomann.de which have separate settings for language, country and units of measurement.



Tip:Pretend to be Irish. You get English, but you also get SI and euro.


> Tip:Pretend to be Irish

Best tip I've seen all day!


I just have a custom locale for any UNIX-like systems I use. American English, UTF-8, 24-hour time, RFC-3339 dates, SI units, '.' decimal point, '_' thousands separator. I call it en_ENG, for the fictional land of Engineeristan.


I just use en_DK which (while not perfectly named) is exactly there to solve this.


That doesn't have `_` as the thousands separator. It uses ISO 8601 for date/times instead of RFC 3339 (so "2022-03-14T15:06:03 EDT" instead of "2022-03-14 15:06:03-04:00"), etc.

I just happen to want slightly different choices than it allows.


Mind to share your LC_ settings?


An explanation of all the valid fields can be found at [1]. Copy an existing locale, modify it to suit your needs. Don't forget to escape all characters as Unicode if you want it to support unicode. Compile & install as normal with localedef, add to `/var/lib/locales/supported.d`, run locale-gen, set the various `LC_` variables you want to use in `~/.profile` or `/etc/envionment` or whatever.

This[2] askubuntu answer goes into more detail.

[1] https://lh.2xlibre.net/locale/en_US/ [2] https://askubuntu.com/a/162714


> I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that.

I do the same. There is usually a locale available with that, look for English (Ireland), English (Europe), English (Denmark), or English (Germany).




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