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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by phantomwise@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 

Personally I think that azerty was meant made by drunk students trying to troll people but it somehow caught on.

  • Hey, qwerty is kinda bad... You think we could try to make one that's even worse to mock it?
  • Oooh that'd be hilarious! Let's make a French version of qwerty but a lot worse!
  • I know, lets put dead keys for all accents except for the accent aigu so that when you need it on an uppercase letter you CAN'T type it!
  • Ahah good one! Let's also not add anyway to type an uppercase cedilla! Imagine, a French keyboard that can't type uppercase é and ç !
  • And what if we rearrange all the punctuation and symbols so that the open and closed parenthesis are no longer next to each other? It'd be sooo funny!
  • Right right! Let's do it too for the brackets and curly braces too!
  • Good one! How about we don't add guillemets which are used in French instead of english double quotes, so that people will be forced to type double quotes and their advanced text editors will have to automatically replace them by guillemets so that the text uses correct punctuation for French?
  • That's so sneaky! Let's also add § so you can cite your sources with the correct paragraph symbol, but not use real quotations marks for the quotes!
  • What else would be really stupid?
  • Let's use one key for a random greek letter!
  • What?
  • You know, like α and β?
  • Ermm... okay... which one? α or β?
  • Neither, people might actually use those once every 2 years. Let's just pick one at random!
  • µ it is! Has anyone even seen that letter used in a French text?
  • Nope, never, so it's perfect!
  • How about also adding ¤?
  • What the hell is ¤?
  • I haven't the faintest clue! And neither do you or most people! That why it's funny!
  • Sure, why not, let's cram pointless characters and not add actually useful ones like guillemets! Any other ideas?
  • Let's put the hyphen on the one most unreachable key!
  • Oh that's a good one!
  • I got better! Let's put the period on the same key as the semicolon, but with the semicolon as the default character, and periods will be Shift+semicolon! That way we can say that it's canonically why French phases are long-winded: it's easier to type a comma or semicolon than a period!
  • Man you're hilarious!

When I was still on Windows I put qwerty as my keyboard layout and used the Alt+number shortcuts for accents because that was less painful than using azerty... Those shortcuts didn't work anymore when I switched to linux so I had to find a real solution, which ended up being a colemak base which I modified to add accented letters. I don't like bepo, it moves z x c v and I like them being in the same place as in qwerty for the shortcuts I'm used to, and I didn't know qwerty-fr existed at the time 😅

Do you have worse for your language?

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[–] guillem@aussie.zone 28 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

In defence of the µ, I actually use it more than the other two, for micro- units.

The ¤ is the symbol for any currency but I have never seen it used in the wild.

[–] Malgas@beehaw.org 7 points 3 weeks ago

I've seen ¤ used as a currency mark in games. Dwarf Fortress is the one that comes to mind, but I feel like I've seen it elsewhere as well.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Oooh I hadn't thought about the micro units thingy and I had no idea about ¤, you do learn stuff everyday 😮

I still think É or Ç or « or » would be more useful though

[–] ik5pvx@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

The real shame is that windows never had the compose key. But all these layouts come from mechanical typewriters, anyway.

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 points 3 weeks ago

On Slavic layouts, the right Alt key (AltGr) lets us type symbols like [, ], {, }, &, @, #, ×, ÷, , đ since 0-9 is for diacritical letters by default and numbers with Shift. Still, Czech Windows users mostly use Alt codes, which is a point of friction when switching to Linux. But there, I'm happy with how I can customize the AltGr and the new AltGr+Shift layers with curly quotes, em dash, nbsp, hair space, arrows, middle dot, pi (π), pretty pi (𝛑), mu, Omega etc. My Compose key is RCtrl.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It is with great reluctance that I say anything nice about Windows, but I did like the ability to type any character from its ALT+number code. Much less convenient than having a good keyboard layout or a compose key, but it's a pretty cool feature.

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[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

EURKEY layout is great for that. It's basically qwerty, but all the european letters and diatrics are places meaningfully. For example ä is right ALT + a

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[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 weeks ago

On a German QWERTZ keyboard too, μ is the only Greek letter you can easily type (altgr+m) and I'm pretty sure this is because of micro units.

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[–] gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

At least with Azerty, you don't run into it in the wild.

The worst layout is alphabetical, because sometimes you are forced to use it.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Right, that reminds me that I'm old enough to remember Minitels with alphabetical keyboards...

[–] MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Some label makers use an alphabetical keyboard. It's frustrating.

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[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I worked in France for a while and I deeply agree with everything you said... Except μ is by far the most useful Greek letter since it is used as a prefix for units of measurement, e.g. μm, μL, etc.

Also the Swiss layout is even worse, it combined all the bad features of the French and German keyboards and then just moves around all the symbols a bit more for good measure.

[–] skami@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

At some point, uppercase letters were written without accent in French. I'm unsure where this comes from, but I heard this was due to the limitations of printing presses, and then typewriters kept the convention.

In any case, the style is quite out of fashion today, but I know people who still write (handwriting and typing) without using accented uppercase letters.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago

Writing unaccented uppercase? TO THE STAAAAAAKE!

The heretics must burn 🔥 🔥 🔥

(I might possibly need therapy to get over French schools teachings about what constitutes "correct French")

[–] nyan@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, that's how I was taught in school in Canada in the 1980s, although no one ever explained why. It always did seem odd.

[–] nemo@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

AZERTY is awful and anyone who uses it is a psychopath or even worse, french (québécois are fine though).

But jokes aside, I regularly switch between typing in French, English, and Spanish (so basically using all the accents and special characters including ñ) and even with all of it's faults, QWERTY with international layout works perfectly for me:

  • all accents are independent so you can capitalize upper and lower case and any kind of letter
  • cedilla is basically just a c with an accent and that's exactly how you type it (in Linux you might have to use a special key unless you actually mean "ć"), same for ñ
  • English apostrophe doubles as the accent key, if you want an apostrophe just press space after hitting the apostrophe key
[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

French Canadian keyboard is QWERTY but with all kind of symbol, like the 1 to = top row can give

with shift !"/$%?&*()_+

with altcar ±@£¢¤¬¦²³¼½¾

We also have the µ¯§¶«»°

and we can do all kind of Èîöç etc

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Is that the one?

You have « » and all the accents? 🤯

You even have OE and AE? 😭

So there's an ACTUALLY usable keyboard for French but no one in France even knows it exists because it's not metropolitan French? Why am I not surprised 😑

You even have division and multiplication symbols and FRACTIONS and every symbol that you might ever need? 😭 😭 😭

And it seems like it would work well for English, French and German?

How have you not conquered the world yet? 😮

[–] RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 4 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

If you use Linux in English, en-CA is also the best locale to use, it has 24 hour time, metric units and simplified (american) language. They will conquer the world with convenience!

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[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

no, the one you put is the "official" french canadian one, used mostly by gov, but everyday people are using the "normal" one

This is why we have not conquered the world yet :)

Do you not use BEPO ?

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Ah that explains it! The other one must terrify people by its sheer overkill awesomeness!

A lot of people I know do use BEPO, but I'm not a fan :

  • It doesn't keep Z, X, C, V in the same place as QWERTY, so all the Ctrl+C shortcuts and such require different movements, and you can't do them all with one hand easily anymore.
  • I mostly type in english, so having keys dedicated to è, ê, à and ç seems a waste of keys
  • I don't like that ç is a separate key at the other side of the keyboard than c and not just AltGr+C
  • Having punctuation in the middle of the keyboard feels weird
  • In the numbers row, it keeps the inversion of numbers and symbols of AZERTY, so that the default characters are the symbols and not the numbers... it's annoying on laptops

There's also Ergo-L which I find a lot more sensible : https://ergol.org/ But again I have nitpicks like Z, X and V being in the same place as in QWERTY... but not C 😑

I gave up on finding a perfect layout so I thought I might as well just use colemak as a base and edit the layout files to add the special characters I need.

I should have called this thread TEARDOWN OF EVERY KEYBOARD LAYOUT!!!! (except the Canadian ones 😂 )

[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 2 points 3 weeks ago

I'd be completely lost with BEPO...

I used QWERTY US in 80-90, it was the only available keyboard on 8bit machine (Sinclair, Amstrad, Commodore, etc), then AZERTY in 90-00 because I had a PC, then moved to Québec so since ~2000 use QWERTY FR_CA. Because of all the switch and never learning how to type, I still type with like 2 fingers :)

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[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

As someone with a Thinkpad, that weird thing Lenovo does where they switch the control and function keys gets me every time I switch between Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad laptops. Usually when I use a non-Thinkpad, it's someone else's laptop and I look like an idiot in front of them wondering why their copy and paste is broken.

I get that the function key isn't technically a standard key on the keyboard (I've only seen them on laptops) and Thinkpads always had that layout dating back the IBM days, but it's still annoying.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

To be fair, they were the first to put a Fn key on laptops, it's everyone else that copied them later but moved the key to a more sensible place. I still hate it though... when I bought a Thinkpad I pestered one of the vendor until he unlocked it (it was on display) and let me look around in the BIOS to see if the option to switch Ctrl and Fn was there, because I wouldn't have bought it otherwise.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 weeks ago

Those parentheses and brackets are unhinged.

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Try the Canadian French layout, it's a much saner French layout IMO.

It focuses on communication, so I use it in combination with the US layout so I can type programming-related characters.

[–] alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Canadian French for programming is great. You have everything you need right there. The only downside is no euro symbol. CMS is something else. It has potential but I find the keybinds less intuitive.

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[–] limelight79@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

This isn't really what you asked, but I feel the need to share my experience using an alternate layout.

I used to use the Dvorak layout - for several years, in fact, and I was pretty good with it. I switched back to Qwerty, because Dvorak just caused too many issues, especially at work, and any speed gains were lost in dealing with switching the layout for tech support and things like that. Sometimes they'd remote in and type, and it would translate their keypresses incorrectly.

Now I doubt they'd even let me switch the keyboard layout (a function they don't expect people to need, so they lock it out to reduce the chance of someone accidentally triggering it).

Qwerty does the job, I guess.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

I grew up en français, albeit in Canada. In our informatique classes, we had CSA standard layout keyboards (IBM, not Microsoft).

It's essentially a QWERTY keyboard with built-in compose key modifier and silkscreened characters on the board for accented characters (capitals included). Not too bad to learn on, and considering that QWERTY would be so prevalent in my life, I think it's a good compromise.

When I was in uni in the 90s and finally ran across an AZERTY keyboard, I literally couldn't use it. Not only is layout different, but the character mod sequence makes no ergonomic sense to me.

~~NB: fun fact, y a pas de mots qui commencent en C cédille. C'est pas pour dire qu'on a pas besoin de majuscules cédillées. :)~~

NBB: ¤ is an end-of-cell marker, introduced at the advent of word processors to distinguish newline and carriage returns from the ends of cells in tables. Not sure if it had a meaning before then, but my memory is saying it had something to do with sub-paragraphs.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's interesting, I'm glad to know people who didn't grow up with azerty also find it awful! Someone else also mentionned CSA, it looks based... all those specials characters 🤩

And just to be nitpicky : Ça sera bientôt les vacances! There, first letter cedilla 😛

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

Ça sera bientôt les vacances!

En effet. Bravo!

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[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

You should be able to use the Compose key on Linux for easy typing of accented characters. eg. Compose ' e = é

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[–] lemonuri@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

Your story reminds me of diving a French car for the first time. No knob or lever can be found in the usual spaces and in the end you always end up giving a turn signal when you try to use the windscreen wiper.

I am using the German QWERTZ most of the time and found the layout rather reasonable. I once tried to learn the neo layout which had the most used letters on the middle row, but you really only can use that at home so I stopped after a week or two as it did not really seemed worth the effort.

[–] JohnDumpling@beehaw.org 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Czecho-Slovak QWERTZ is fine, but it annoys me that you have to guess whether a keyboard is set to QWERTY or QWERTZ. Z and Y are the only characters that are switched. I gave up as I frequently switch to English QWERTY; now I just use QWERTY for both languages.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

That's a weirdly specific change to make to QWERTY

[–] Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago

It happens to layouts. Some people add some small changes to make an alternate layout which makes more sense to them. For example, Colemak and Colemak-DH. DH only changes 3 keys, shifts 3, and swaps 2.

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[–] a1tsca13@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Atomic Frontier on YouTube trained a machine learning model on his prior emails, assignments, etc., and had it determine his personal worst keyboard layout. He posted the code on GitHub for others to do the same.

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[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago

I hate AZERTY so much it hurts my brains

[–] brianary@startrek.website 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If you don't like BÉPO because you want familiar letter-based clipboard shortcuts, you've already made a better layout selection impossible. I learned to use the older clipboard shortcuts: ctrl+ins for copy, shift+ins for paste, and shift+del for cut. Those are still as universally supported.

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[–] Canadian_Cabinet@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 weeks ago

Its pretty funny how the Spain Spanish keyboard has almost every one of these same keys yet isn't insane

[–] Jack@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Aren't the A and Q keys also at terrible positions?

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago

Good point I'd forgotten about that! We use A a lot and Q almost never so obviously we need both letters switched around so that the pinkie is on the letter Q and A is harder to reach 😂

[–] Gueoris@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As an azerty user, I don't see the issue with the uppercase accent letter. It's super easy to do on linux, no?

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Having to use workarounds for your keyboad layout to be usable means that it's a bad keyboard layout

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[–] eutampieri@feddit.it 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

DK/SE layout is surprisingly good for european languages, say better than the Italian one

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