Bug#1122892: gnome-shell: clock shows minutes on the left, hour on the right in Arabic(?) locale

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 gnome-shell: clock shows minutes on the left, hour on the right in Arabic(?) locale
Control: tags -1 + trixie moreinfo

On Sat, 13 Dec 2025 at 21:53:55 +0100, Mohamed Ala Belgacem wrote:
>the clock is inverted
>
>its showing 40:21 instead of 21:40 (its the same case using am/pm)

What is the output of the "locale" command in a terminal?

 From the text in your screenshot next to the clock, I would guess the 
locale might be Arabic or maybe Farsi, which are written right-to-left 
if I understand correctly?

Are times normally shown left-to-right (hour on the left) in countries 
that use these languages/scripts?

I believe the clock as displayed in GNOME Shell comes from the 
localization files in the gnome-desktop package. The Arabic, Farsi and 
Hebrew localizations in that package have some overrides to force the 
formatting of the clock (Hebrew is another right-to-left language) but 
perhaps they are not working as intended.

     smcv