LC_CTYPE setting wrongly reverses the UI
Affected version
gnome-shell-44.5 on Fedora 38.
Bug summary
For ages, I have in my ~/.zprofile
the setting export LC_CTYPE=he_IL.utf8
. This changes the behavior of some of the applications that I use, but it never used to change Gnome itself, and in particular it never changed Gnome's language from English (note that this is just LC_CTYPE that I set, not LANGUAGE, and moreover, Gnome has its own language configuration where I chose English).
Unfortunately, since a relatively recent Gnome upgrade this setting started reversing the order of the UI - for example, the Activities is now on the right instead of on the left as when LC_CTYPE isn't set, and all the menus themselves are right-to-left as well. Which is weird, because all the text is still in English - as expected - not in Hebrew. Just the order is wrong.
I think Gnome should determine its right-to-leftness not from LC_CTYPE but from its language configuration. If it correctly displays English text on menus, not Hebrew, it should also know to use the directionality that is appropriate to English, not to Hebrew.
Steps to reproduce
- See the "Activities" button is on the top-left side of the display.
- Put "export LC_CTYPE=he_IL.utf8" in your shell's configuration (e.g., ~/.zprofile, ~/.profile, etc.)
- Log out and log back in.
- See the "Activities" button moved to the top-right side. All the other menus and things also look "reversed". But everything is still in English, as expected.
What happened
The UI got "reversed" by the LC_CTYPE configuration.
What did you expect to happen
Since the LC_CTYPE setting does not change the UI language (as indeed, it shouldn't!), it also shouldn't change the UI direction (what appears on the left, and what on the right. The UI should look exactly the same with LC_CTYPE set as it did before this setting.