How do I rename home folders (Documents, Pictures, ...) after changing the system language?

Ask Fedora
, ,
1

Hi,

I changed the language of my Fedora installation from German to English and now I’d like to properly rename folders in my /home/<user> directory (i.e. Dokumente to Documents etc.). How do I do that? I could manually rename them but I assume that this could break settings in other applications and services, right?

What I tried so far:

  • I switched the setting Region & Language > Language to American English, navigated to Login Screen (SDDM), clicked on Apply Plasma Settings and rebooted. No change.
  • Based on another post.: I deleted the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs and - after checking ~/.config/user-dirs.locale - recreated it with xdg-user-dirs-update --force. No change.

Output of localectl:

System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Output of locale:

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

File /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults

# Default settings for user directories
#
# The values are relative pathnames from the home directory and
# will be translated on a per-path-element basis into the users locale
DESKTOP=Desktop
DOWNLOAD=Downloads
TEMPLATES=Templates
PUBLICSHARE=Public
DOCUMENTS=Documents
MUSIC=Music
PICTURES=Pictures
VIDEOS=Videos

File ~/.config/user-dirs.locale:
en_DK

File ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs (before deletion and after recreation):

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# 
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Schreibtisch"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Vorlagen"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Öffentlich"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Dokumente"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Musik"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Bilder"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

Thanks in advance!

2

When I changed language, I clicked or right clicked on one of them in the file manager and the system offered to me to rename them. YMMV.

You might need extra packages. Not sure, it’s been 10 months since. I changed from english to french and here are the pertinent packages.

$ dnf list installed *-fr.*
Paquets installés
autocorr-fr.noarch                                                                1:24.2.5.2-2.fc40                                                     @updates
glibc-langpack-fr.x86_64                                                          2.39-22.fc40                                                          @updates
hunspell-fr.noarch                                                                6.2-16.fc40                                                           @fedora 
hyphen-fr.noarch                                                                  3.0-16.fc40                                                           @fedora 
kde-l10n-fr.noarch                                                                17.08.3-17.fc40                                                       @fedora 
langpacks-core-fr.noarch                                                          4.0-13.fc40                                                           @updates
langpacks-fonts-fr.noarch                                                         4.0-13.fc40                                                           @updates
langpacks-fr.noarch                                                               4.0-13.fc40                                                           @updates
libreoffice-help-fr.x86_64                                                        1:24.2.5.2-2.fc40                                                     @updates
libreoffice-langpack-fr.x86_64                                                    1:24.2.5.2-2.fc40                                                     @updates
man-pages-fr.noarch                                                               3:4.21.0-3.fc40                                                       @fedora 
mythes-fr.noarch
4

I figured out what the issue was by performing the following steps

  1. Firstly, I removed ~/.config/plasma-localerc to have a clean slate.
  2. Then I adapted the settings in Region & Language again, but this time I only used American English and did not specify any other language. There is a warning saying that having other languages below English might cause issues.
  3. rm ~/.config/user-dirs.locale
  4. xdg-user-dirs-update --force, this time it worked and used English folder names!

I experimented a little further and noticed that when I configured Konsole to use a fallback language (e.g., German) then xdg-user-dirs-update did not work at all.

Note: the locale command only gives information about standard output, so that was another reason for my confusion.