Web UI and Desktop languages

[hacdias]

Right now, Desktop gets its language from the operating system its running on and passes it to the Web UI. Although, the user can change the language of the Web UI via its Settings, which does not affect the language of IPFS Desktop and then we get a mixed UI.

I've got some possible options to solve this issue:

Option	Pros	Cons
Change Desktop's language according to Web UI's	Easy to find on settings and simple for the user	We can't make sure if there are the same languages for both the Web UI and Desktop
Hide the language option on Web UI and just use the OS language	No problems whatsoever	The user can't pick a different language
Create some kind of menu that is smart and knows the available languages for both Web UI and Desktop and only shows the ones that exist for both	Works best	More work, but feasible I think. Harder to keep up to date with all translations.

@olizilla @fsdiogo @lidel what do you think?

[lidel]

Depends who is the target audience. I believe the goal is to encourage contributing missing translations, so we should not be hiding them. We crowdsource translations from community. To get to translation parity between Web UI and Desktop we should surface missing translations, so potential contributors see what is missing.

I'd go with low hanging fruit: "Change Desktop's language according to Web UI's".
If desktop is missing language selected in Web UI, it should fallback to English strings.

If we want to go extra mile, Desktop could also display a message asking user if they would like to contribute missing translation, clicking Yes would redirect them to https://www.transifex.com/ipfs/ipfs-desktop/)

[hacdias]

First part is done, we now need to drive the extra mile.

Desktop could also display a message asking user if they would like to contribute missing translation, clicking Yes would redirect them to transifex.com/ipfs/ipfs-desktop)

[hacdias]

This is something trivial to do. @lidel @jessicaschilling do you think this is still useful?

[jessicaschilling]

Yes!

[hacdias]

Maybe a dialog when a person opens IPFS Desktop for the first time and then leaving a button on the menu to contribute (maybe under About)?

[jessicaschilling]

Only for folks for whom their chosen WebUI language doesn't exist in Desktop, right? If so, that sounds good.

[hacdias]

Uh, I get it now and it may be more complicated than what I thought then. I'll investigate, but it is certainly possible.

[lidel]

I think #847 + #1447 are good enough to close this issue. 😬

I am worried anything more will be diminishing returns, or even cause harm (displaying popups to a new user that just installed the app may be annoying).

[jessicaschilling]

Makes sense to me. We can always revisit if necessary.