Date format in desktop notification bar in wrong format

Support and Help
1

Hi.
Date format appears wrong in the desktop notification area. Any ideas what I can look at to fix?
I’m running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS and I’m in Australia.
Under System - Language and Region it says my account has a language of ‘English (Australia)’ and Formats is ‘Australia’. In that latter part is shows a preview showing date ‘16/12/2024’ which for me is correct.
Problem is in the notification bar header it is showing the date/time as ‘Dec 16 09:19’ and when I click it, I see reminders for calendar appointments also in US format.
Hopefully this screenshot shows these differences:
image

2

It would also be very helpful to include this:

timedatectl
### And
locale

Also try this:

killall gnome-panel

And lastly try to Right click the Gnome panel and remove the offending applets and re-add it, i.e. Indicator Applet, etc.

BTW Welcome to Discourse @stevefrom3115

3

Thanks for the really quick reply. Hope I’ve formatted this correctly:

steve@nuc:~$ timedatectl
               Local time: Mon 2024-12-16 09:39:11 AEDT
           Universal time: Sun 2024-12-15 22:39:11 UTC
                 RTC time: Mon 2024-12-16 09:39:30
                Time zone: Australia/Melbourne (AEDT, +1100)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: yes

Warning: The system is configured to read the RTC time in the local time zone.
         This mode cannot be fully supported. It will create various problems
         with time zone changes and daylight saving time adjustments. The RTC
         time is never updated, it relies on external facilities to maintain it.
         If at all possible, use RTC in UTC by calling
         'timedatectl set-local-rtc 0'.
steve@nuc:~$ locale
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_AU
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ALL=
steve@nuc:~$ killall gnome-panel
gnome-panel: no process found
steve@nuc:~$ sudo killall gnome-panel
gnome-panel: no process found
steve@nuc:~$ echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
ubuntu:GNOME
steve@nuc:~$
4

You did fine, but what about " ```
timedatectl

Mine for an example

timedatectl
Local time: Sun 2024-12-15 16:11:20 MST
Universal time: Sun 2024-12-15 23:11:20 UTC
RTC time: Sun 2024-12-15 23:11:21
Time zone: America/Denver (MST, -0700)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no

5

That was the first command I listed with output. Here’s a screenshot of that initial part of my reply:
image

6

I’m not sure how I missed that, and thanks.
Please try this:

timedatectl set-local-rtc 0

Any better?

7

Unfortunately no change.

teve@nuc:~$ timedatectl
               Local time: Mon 2024-12-16 13:15:32 AEDT
           Universal time: Mon 2024-12-16 02:15:32 UTC
                 RTC time: Mon 2024-12-16 02:15:32
                Time zone: Australia/Melbourne (AEDT, +1100)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no
steve@nuc:~$

image
image1003×115 14 KB

8

That’s this GNOME bug: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3338

The clock in the top bar is implemented in gnome-desktop, the calendar header in gnome-shell.

Both work by marking the format string as translatable, but nobody has provided an en_AU translation.

If no translations is found, the original string as it appears in the source is used (which happens to be en_US).

So either help out with translations (others will be grateful!) or try an extension like https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4655/date-menu-formatter/

3 Likes
9

You could try this Gnome extension.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1462/panel-date-format/

I have not used it but it was mentioned on Ask Ubuntu here. Look at the answer “For GNOME versions up to 46 (Ubuntu 24.04)*”

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1345507/how-can-i-change-the-date-and-time-format-in-gnome-shells-top-bar

(Just saw elcste already suggested an extension which has more downloads than the one I posted.)

10

Seems someone has done it but for whatever reason those changes haven’t made it to a release.

Edward Savage @nonsensecrocodile· 2 years ago
Translations required to reorder the dates per Australian norms submitted to gnome-desktop and gnome-shell. It's not clear to me if these patches will be automatically merged so I'll check back in a few weeks and poke around if nothing has happened.

Thanks for all the excellent feedback. Great to see people willing to help out and so quickly.

As it is cosmetic I’ll leave as is for now. Maybe the next LTS will have en_AU date/time translation :wink:

1 Like