Go to a shell and make sure that the environment variable LC_ALL isn't set, as it overrides everything. What this will do to you is make it so certain characters aren't available to applications and then the fonts don't render correctly.
#should be blank
echo $LC_ALL
locale
Should say:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
If any of these say C that is the entire problem.
Run local -a
#output
❯ locale -a
C
C.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IL
en_IL.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX
Figure out which one matches your location, and copy/paste it to this command
localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Log out, do the confirmation at the beginning again. If you still can't figure out what is setting LC_ALL, you can explicitly set it to "" in your ~/.profile. Your window environment loads these variables in when you start a session by processing the file.
