Calendar uses wrong Day Month Year format, i.e. MM/DD/YYYY instead of DD/MM/YYYY

Applications
1

In the Terminal everything seems to be in order:

imperator-knoedel@knoedel-gay-ming:~$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.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=
imperator-knoedel@knoedel-gay-ming:~$ date
Mi 11. Mär 09:06:04 CET 2026

The date and time displayed on the taskbar are to my liking as well.

Yet the Gnome Calendar App itself displays Event Reminders like so:

Eventname Weekday MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM

What gives?

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2

What distro and version?

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3

System Details Report

Software Information:

  • Firmware Version: P.70
  • OS Name: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
  • OS Build: (null)
  • OS Type: 64-bit
  • GNOME Version: 46
  • Windowing System: Wayland
  • Kernel Version: Linux 6.17.0-14-generic

The Calendar Version is 46.1.

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4

This version is sadly unsupported by upstream for quite some time now :frowning: You can update your machine to newer version to see if that fixed your problem. For comparison, in a week we have stable GNOME 50 release.

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5

The clock/date in the top bar need to be translated to show up in the correct format. It doesn’t use the locale system. When it is not translated for the language you are using, it falls back to the format in the source code, which is the horrible en_US one. (I’m American but I don’t like the American date format :slight_smile:) I got this from this bug about the same kind of issue with en_AU and I see the same thing when I use en_CA.

So the best fix is to do the translation. But I found a workaround that works for me with en_CA: add en_UK, which is translated with the format we want.

Open the Language Support app and in the Language tab make sure English (United Kingdom) is in the list above English. I have mine set to

  • English (Canada)
  • English (Australia)
  • English (United Kingdom)
  • English

and once I do this I see the date format from English (United Kingdom). You can also click Apply System-Wide to update the login screen. (To be clear, this will change other things to en_UK: I now see “Aeroplane Mode” and “Rubbish Bin” but I don’t mind myself.)

Edit: Sorry, I totally misread. I thought you were asking about the shell bar clock/calendar but you say they are OK for you.

6

Yet the Gnome Calendar App itself displays Event Reminders like so:

Eventname Weekday MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM

Do you mean in the GNOME Calendar event editor dialog window, or do you mean the desktop notification?

If we’re talking about the notification, if it’s actually a bug then it’s a bug in Evolution Data Server, rather than the GNOME Calendar app. For example, I know that EDS’ notifications doesn’t respect GNOME’s 12-hour vs 24-hour time format setting (nor even Evolution’s own 12-vs-24-hours format setting!), and in that ticket I haven’t been able to convince Milan that this should take precedence over the locale’s format…

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