Hi - I just installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I do not see how to switch to 24-hour time. I see locale settings, but there is no obvious option there. I’ve been using OpenSUSE (various versions) for about 10 years and this is the first time I do not see an option for something so simple. Maybe, I’m just missing it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
If you’re referring to the Plasma panel clock, it’s controlled via its context menu, not locale settings, as it’s been AFAIK since before KDE3. If you’re referring to the format generally, there is an upstream Plasma bug that depends on a longstanding upstream QT bug that still wasn’t fixed last I checked on it. Which DE or WM are you using?
Yes, I am aware you can change the panel clock. And that’s sort of helps. But that only affects the clock, not all applications that use time.
But the larger issue is why all the detailed locale settings are country based now. This is idiotic. What if want 24-hour time format and metric in the US/English locale? With today’s set-up, I have to select some random country that happens to have those settings that I want.
I do not have these issues with Windows or older versions of OpenSUSE. Why does Linux so often move two steps back every time it moves forward?
Many people agree with you. And as mentioned above it is already so for some time (and still a show stopper for me). It not only the clock it is also the date (no way to have your date according to the ISO standard).
But it is purely KDE. (and/or products that KDE is using, but that is indifferent to the KDE user). So blaming Linux is a bit overdone IMHO.
After all it is free. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. 
Well, actually it’s the standard locale system in Linux.
KDE dropped their custom one in favour of using what Qt offers, which in turn only uses what’s available on the system (it is cross-platform after all and also available for Windows and MacOS e.g.).
That said, yes there is room for improvements, and AFAIK there are plans (on the Qt side) for that, but I don’t know if anybody is really actively working on that currently.
PS: see also https://wiki.qt.io/Locale_Support_in_Qt_5 , in particular https://wiki.qt.io/Locale_Support_in_Qt_5#User_Customization_on_Linux
This type of brain-dead mentality has been common in the Linux community since I have been a part of it. So yes, I will blame “Linux” meaning the Linux community. I have used Linux since 1997 and have used OpenSUSE since 2008. Whether it is systemd or ridiculous broken audio daemons, the Linux community seems to actively hinder its own adoption and frustrates its users.
You can say that it’s “free”. But there are huge companies dumping money into it (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.). It’s not hackers in the basement developing Linux and hasn’t been for over 15 years. Red Hat Enterprise certainly isn’t free. And neither is SLES.
And you could say “fix it yourself”. And yes, I have tried that. When your patches are rejected because dudes with egos bigger than their coding ability reject moves in the right direction, it’s frustrating. So now I will just bring up issues and hope others will address them. Linux devs do need to grow up, find some maturity, and realize that maybe their own misguided personal opinions shouldn’t be inflicted on everyone else. This is why I switched to Windows on the desktop. Linux kept getting worse…
@erikvcl: While I can understand your “frustration” to some degree, ranting about that in some random user forum (like here) won’t change things either I’m afraid… :sarcastic:
For me is free. I did not pay for it.
And I hope to never switch back to Windows.
What I like about Linux: because it is free (kernel) we can admire the human creativity.
Sorry for my English I hope you can understand what I want to say.
systemd is a hundred paces forward for Linux. It fixed decades outstanding issues that many of us who run larger networks needed to work around and offers new features you weren’t able to perform without resorting to either 3rd party utilities or scraping together a web of scripts.
Just because you don’t understand how or why something works doesn’t make it bad.
You have made a good choice.
You loved linux for years and now no more, many here have done the same with their ex-wife … I hope they do not come here to say it in the Forum 
… yes, I have a major dislike of this. AFAIR, though, the problem is actually upstream of KDE at QT, and they do not seem interested in doing anything about it.
I don’t think this is so much about interest as about lack of competent resources available for free that could do it even if interested. This is probably why KDE kicked the subject previously handled internally upstream to QT when abandoning v4 and writing v5 from scratch. This probably requires somebody pay somebody with competence a lot of money to make it happen.
v5 was not at all “written from scratch”. In fact, quite a few bugs were actually carried over from v4 (or even v3) to v5…
One part of the KF5 effort was indeed to push things/additional functionality to Qt where it made sense, or drop things in KDE Frameworks in favor of now available functionality in Qt5 that was missing before.
The rest is probably true though.
True that numerous KDE3 and KDE4 bugs even today remain open in Plasma5. Nevertheless, unfixable bugs were announced justification for switching to newer underpinning QT versions. And, important (to me) KDE3 features disappeared with KDE4 and remain missing even in today’s Plasma5. Switching from QT3 to the “new and improved” QT4, and then repeated with QT5, amounts in many ways IMO to “from scratch”, twice, since both milestones involved new paradigm introductions and old paradigm terminations. Something must have changed rather radically for that entire sequence of events to have occurred.
This blaming on QT by upstream KDE has been grating on me for too long. I ceased including Plasma on Leap installations too long ago to remember any more. KDE3 has been working well enough up until relatively recently, but as Plasma5 still doesn’t look destined to include any more of what’s missing that KDE3 had, I’ll be moving my main installation to TDE when I switch it to 15.0, leaving me to be annoyed by Plasma foibles only on TW and lesser distros.
Not quite.
The main reason actually is that earlier Qt versions are unmaintained and won’t get updates any more.
That’s true for Qt4 since years, and even more so for Qt3 which doesn’t even build anymore on TW (or Leap 15 for that matter) and therefore got removed (because nobody fixed it).
Switching from QT3 to the “new and improved” QT4, and then repeated with QT5, amounts in many ways IMO to “from scratch”, twice, since both milestones involved new paradigm introductions and old paradigm terminations.
This is rather off-topic here.
And actually I don’t even want to discuss it with you further as you clearly don’t have the necessary inside knowledge anyway.
Just a hint: even Qt wasn’t “rewritten from scratch” in Qt4 or 5. They did deprecate things, and remove it later then though.
OTOH, a lot of things have been added or improved.