In Debian I have set up multiple users. The OS was installed in English.
Next I ran
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locale
and selected multiple other languages (such as German, Spanish, and French) and installed them.
I then created the new users all as standard users with no password.
I logged in as one user "spanish" and edited their ~/.bashrc with the following:
export LANG=es_MX.utf8
export LANGUAGE=es_MX:es
I then logged out and logged back in. I checked in the console with
echo $LANG
which returned
es_MX.utf8
however, nothing on the system seems to have changed. The menu, all the applications, console, etc - everything is still in English.
I had hoped to be able to have different languages set for each user of the system. Am I doing this correctly or am I completely misunderstanding what "locale" is used for? If so, is it possible to have different language environments for different users in Debian 9 (stretch)? I'm using the Cinnamon desktop, if that makes a difference.
Also, would I need to install new, language-specific versions of Firefox and LibreOffice or are there language packs I could install?
EDIT: According to certain older documentations, the Language Module was removed from the Cinnamon Control Panel in versions 2.2 and later. (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cinnamon#Manage_languages_used_in_Cinnamon) The only way to control it is apparently with a Mint-specific package called mintlocale, which, from what I can tell, doesn't have a Debian version. I was hoping there was a command-line or config-file way to accomplish the same thing, but I'm also willing to change distros to one that supports multiple languages if Debian won't work.