I don't know if it's more or less clean to use environment variables, but it certainly is easier. The official Gentoo wiki recommends it to set the locale, anyway. And, well, in Gentoo you need to do stuff manually anyway, so no big difference there. :) Btw, it should read LANG=de_CH.UTF-8, of course. Anyway, I agree that it works much better on Linux than Windows or even Android. It's so annoying that having the language set to English makes it show American news in the Google News app.

For me, having LANGUAGE=de_CH.UTF-8 and LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 works pretty well on Gentoo, without me having to create my own locale. Of course, occasionally I get a sentence which is half German, half English, especially in KDE, but I don't care much.

Consider me unimpressed. The Swiss military spent 750 Million Dollar on a similar system called "Führungsinformationssystem Heer" that also spectacularly failed to fulfill its intended purpose (or any other purpose, for that matter). While, in absoulte terms, this may not be quite as much as the US Air Force spent, you have to keep in mind that this is the equivalent of a seventh of the annual budget of the Swiss military. Also, they have not stopped this project yet, so there is no saying they won't exceed the US Air Force project.

Yeah, effortlessly navigating streets that don't exist...