From the conversation above I thought there was only one option for English on the setup and you had to choose your locale later. This means that you do get a locale by default with either dollars or pounds as the currency. An Irish user will have to choose a random one of these on setup and then either get presented with dollars or pounds forever or learn how to change their settings. Very smooth user experience for British or US users, less good for everyone else.
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While i agree with the base premise of being able to choose locale being good, i donât think there is anything that will show you currency stuff at all in SFOS, let alone according to locale. They keyboard has several currency symbols, none really more prominent than the other.
Do you have a good source for comparing locales BTW? Would be interesting to learn the full set of differences.
Probably the Android or Chromium sources will have a good comparison. Even if nothing in the OS knows about currency, the browser will by default use the system locale I believe. Specific apps will use the system default.
I recall one time I had a cheap temporary phone where the Irish locale was removed (it was a Nokia running android which I bought off the shelf in France; sometimes a manufacturer removes Android locales they consider unimportant), so I just choose India from the locale options and every time I opened the âIndeedâ jobs app it would show me jobs in India and I would have to switch manually back to Ireland.
If you buy a high end Android device from someone like Samsung or if you buy pretty much any device in Ireland it will come with the option of English (Ireland). Any device that doesnât have this locale is unlikely to break into the Irish market in my opinion. When you are not British and not American; being forced to choose which one of these is going to be your adopted country when you are on your phone is not really acceptable.
The big companies cross the 'Tâs and dot the 'Iâs in this regard and will continue to dominate the Irish market in the absence of a viable localised alternative.
Thank you though for the acknowledgment of the fact that being able to choose your locale is a good thing. I think that if you give the option of US English vs UK English then it is being acknowledged implicitly but with the caveat that only those 2 country locales are important and if your preferred language is English but you live in another country then you just have to suck it up; choose ones of these and tweak everything afterwards.
SFOS is a nieche
if language details are your issueâŚ
i am austrian, my language differs significantly from german german. There is no german german btw. Ask a saxon and bawarian or simebody from hamburg.
however they seem to be able to live with the one german option
anyway, i think you know what you can expect localewise now
Correct; but anything on the web will geo-locate you through your IP, not your locale. An anectode about some shoddy Android app is not all that relevant here.
Many millions of people use English without a locale matching their country (me included for some systems) with fairly few issues. Sure, the more locale-savvy will put en_DK or indeed en_IE for doing that, but most just pick one of the big ones.
This would imply you had some knowledge of that UK would be bad or wrong in some regard (even worse than Indian with their non-SI decimal grouping?). Please educate us. In what way would it be measurably different than UK English?
If you only judge correctness by what it says in the menu, even i will have a hard time mustering significant sympathy.
Yes, looks like the direction here is to be niche long term so I will look elsewhere.
At the moment there is no en_IE because there hasnât been much (i.e. any to my knowledge) demand for it and I donât think it would make a big difference anyway. What I gather the language and locale data differences to en_GB should be fairly small if nearly non-existent on phone context. Currency is different but that shouldnât be used from the locale, and itâs not really used on the UI anyway that much.
For contributions, the locale data should already exist for this and that on lower level Qt side. The problem with translations here is that I donât think it makes sense to have a fully separate translation for more English variants but rather have a fallback system so the variants would only contain the delta where needed, if any. We have now translations as âen_GBâ and âen_USâ. If we renamed former translations as generic âenâ then we could be relatively easily add some variants, but then we couldnât be adding variants of en_US.
Not totally out of the question, and in the long run it would be nice to have better support for the locale variants, but Iâm not yet entirely convinced if there are enough use cases where this should really matter.
There used to be requests for the âEuro Englishâ locale in the past.
If the interest is still there, it could accumulate a critical mass to get such locale added for all users whoâd want the European metric system (which navigation and measurement apps could default to), ISO date format, week starting on Monday, time shown as 24-hours, and Iâm sure the âŹuro symbol would be prevalent in any currency-related apps in the Jolla store (and definitely in the Android world, where AppSupport defaults to Sailfish OS locale).
However all such users would still prefer Sailfish OS in English, and this is why such posts used to come up: https://together.jolla.com/question/134467/official-announcement-translate-sailfish-os-elections-of-community-languages-linguists/?answer=167773#post-id-167773 (Stack Exchange link within is also of interest, where en_DK and en_IE are being considered.)
Perhaps English (Europe) might be a more sensible option to present on setup, but I am sure there are English speakers outside of Europe that might want to use English who still donât identify with any of the 3 locales listed.
Those countries may speak English due to colonialism and may find some or all of these country options unpalatable.
Those markets also might not be of interest to Sailfish and that is fine.
I am not looking for sympathy here, I am looking to establish if Sailfish is something worth looking into (for me) based on its current state and itâs direction.
It was tricky to parse the answers but my understanding is:
- 2 english locale options on startup
- English (US)
- English (UK)
- this will likely always be the case based on current direction
- I could contribute to adding a locale but it will always be something that needs to be installed later rather than shipped with the phone.
I have enough information now. Thanks everyone for their responses.
For the interest of completeness to other readers:
Certainly, but the numbers to gain traction arenât that high given Sailfish community is centered around Europe.
A translation that is actively maintained gets officialized and shipped with devices/flashable images, quoting from here:
Officially supported
Appear in Settings | Languages, and available in downloadable device images, thatâs why the progress needs to hit 100% during every translation round in order not to delay SFOS updates.