I’ve been using Ubuntu Server to create a custom minimal KDE Plasma install, using kde-plasma-desktop, which always worked fine prior to 25.04.
Now, on the current Ubuntu, KDE Plasma has a lot of missing German language files. The language-pack-kde-de doesn’t install any translations into /usr/share/locale/de. In System Settings, KDE only lists “C” and “American English” to download/install.
I’ve gone through all packages containing “i18n” and “l10n”, and none of them contribute to translating KDE. Even installing the “correct” kubuntu-desktop metapackage doesn’t include any translations. My locale is fully German:
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=de
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
I also tried forcing APT to install German translation files by adding:
Acquire::Languages { "de"; };
into /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/, but that didn’t work either.
So my conclusion is that there seems to be a bug in Ubuntu Server that forces KDE to default to English, no matter what locale you’re using, which wasn’t the case in older Ubuntu versions…
Ubuntu Version:
25.04 Server
Desktop Environment (if applicable):
KDE Plasma Desktop
Problem Description:
Ubuntu Server 25.04 does not download translation files, no matter what locale you’re using
Screenshots or Error Messages:
KWin and System Settings is in German, the rest of the system is not, like Dolphin, Ark etc.
What I’ve Tried:
Downloading the non-working “language-pack-kde-de”, “language-selector-gnome”, setting my locale to german. Going through many config files.