Comment - troubleshooting locale errors

Another note is: if you experience locale confusion after logging in over SSH even though all’s fine when logged in locally it can be an e.g. stray LANGUAGE setting in the logged-into system’s /etc/locale.conf.

Not sure what sets that – may have been the installer – and also not sure what applies it but presumably pam or logind. In any case it’s likely the issue if a local session has no LANGUAGE set in its environment but an SSH one does. Simply deleting LANGUAGE from /etc/locale.conf manually is working for me.

if you get such error - it may be KDE related - on the remote system.

The locale you see in the terminal when you have an open ssh session - should always be the remote configuration.

An installer generated locale.conf will look like

 $ cat /etc/locale.conf
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_NAME=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=da_DK.UTF-8
LC_TIME=da_DK.UTF-8

when a secondary language is used for LC_specific settings like numeric or phone number.

The only case I have seen the LANGUAGE= is when you use Plasma systemsettings to change locale - in some complicated cases this creates a ridiculous confusion because a ~/.config/plasma-localerc is also read.

That was not the case here; both sides are newish Manjaro XFCE. A bit more description at: Changed system language from French to English, but it remains partially in French - #13 by rene. Thought I’d not add too much of an essay under a to-the-point HowTo…