In 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh with 128K of memory. The primitive 1.0 version of the Finder acknowledged that when sorting a list it made sense to sort it case insensitively for humans, versus sorting on the raw bytes of the name like a computer.
This morning I attempted to delete `bookmarks.html` from a sea of files starting with uppercase letters in GNOME Files. It wasn't with the 'B' files, instead it was after 'Zed'.
Edit: this is a musl issue, not a GNOME one (see reply)
@wezm that's very weird. The sorting is actually locale dependent in GNOME Files, but with an English locale selected you should be getting case insensitive sort.
I'm not sure how this would happen on any standard distro, but it seems like you might have the "C" locale selected? Or perhaps have overridden just the LC_COLLATE variable? (I've actually done this intentionally on one of my systems)
@kepstin The only locale looking things I have set in my environment appear to be:
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
GDM_LANG='en_AU.UTF-8'
LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8
GNOME Settings is as attached. Anything look off there?
@wezm @kepstin This is weird indeed. Your locale looks good, so the only explanation I have is that for some reason the locale definitions are not properly installed.
But if they're not installed, why are you able to even select it in the settings?
Could you try to open a terminal and use sort to sort a text file with a mix of upper and lower case? The sort command should use locale-dependent sorting just like the file manager, but if that works, then this is actually a bug in GNOME. If it doesn't work, then we can remove GNOME from the equation and try to figure out what's wrong with the locale files.
@loke Ok, I think it's just musl libc. Seems that proper collation is not implemented yet.
https://wiki.musl-libc.org/open-issues.html#Locale_limitations
https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/locale/wcscoll.c
https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2017/11/26/8
https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2017/11/26/9
@wezm ah yes, thar explains the issue.
It's a bit surprising though. Isn't musl supposed to be a drop-in replacement of glibc? You'd think locale support would be important.
Then again, I've seen people intentionally running with LANG=C because tgey abhor the idea of any kind of localisation at all (they also hate UTF-8)
@loke @wezm FWIW we (postmarketOS) are working on implementing this together with upstream musl: https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2025/06/02/2
Also, Wesley, maybe you could update the original post with an edit stating that this is due to a shortcoming in musl and not GNOME? RIght now it's plain misleading and makes GNOME seems a lot more behind than it really is. I get that it still happens with upstream GNOME but using musl instead of glibc can hardly be considered mainstream Linux.
Wesley Moore
kepstin
Elias Mårtenson
Newbyte