2.2 Setting the Locale Used by GUI Programs

The immediately available programs in a user’s desktop come from a group of programs called a “desktop environment”; it usually includes the window manager, a web browser, a text editor, and more. The most common free desktop environments are KDE, GNOME, and Xfce.

The locale used by GUI programs of the desktop environment can be specified in a configuration screen called “control center”, “language settings” or “country settings”.

Individual GUI programs that are not part of the desktop environment can have their locale specified either in a settings panel, or through environment variables.

For some programs, it is possible to specify the locale through environment variables, possibly even to a different locale than the desktop’s locale. This means, instead of starting a program through a menu or from the file system, you can start it from the command-line, after having set some environment variables. The environment variables can be those specified in the next section (Setting the Locale through Environment Variables); for some versions of KDE, however, the locale is specified through a variable KDE_LANG, rather than LANG or LC_ALL.

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