gnome-terminal not launching and Gnome language setting has no effect

Dear all,

I recently switched from Leap to Tumbleweed. I did a fresh install of the system (keeping only the /home directory as it was on another partition). I am using Gnome 3.26.2. Now, changing the language in Gnome settings does not have any effect on the language used for the GUI. Everything is in english, no matter what language I have chosen. In addition, gnome-terminal does not launch anymore. I found several existing threads suggesting that it has something to do with the locale settings. But, nothing worked so far to resolve this issue.

The output of locale command (executed in XTerm) is:


locale

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=C

The output of locale -a is:


locale -a | grep en_US

en_US
en_US.iso885915
en_US.utf8

The output of localectl is:


localectl

System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
VC Keymap: de-nodeadkeys
X11 Layout: de
X11 Model: microsoftpro
X11 Variant: nodeadkeys
X11 Options: terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

When trying to start gnome-terminal from XTerm I get:


gnome-terminal

Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: Timeout was reached

I have a second user, where everything works fine. I can switch the language to German and also the terminal launches. So, I guess this must have something to do with a user setting and not a system wide setting.

I would be happy about any help on this issue.

I’m having this exact same issue in Oct’18

“dbus-launch gnome-terminal” is one work-around.

Solution

mv ~/.config/dconf/user ~/.config/dconf/user.old

It’s a binary file, and I have no idea how to inspect it.
Then gnome-terminal launches on Tumbleweed.