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It takes people a long time to readjust preconceptions. Microsoft was the big bad for most of my life, but it took ~8 years after Ballmerś retirement for people to start noticing Microsoftś prestigious opensourcing, interesting cloud offerings etc. where itś now a commonplace that they've improved. Fascinating really.

Oracleś got quite the history, but they have been supporting Linux and Java well and killing Solaris was a segue into Linux too, ergo more open.



Microsoft is still a big bad. As is Oracle.

That they do some things you and I may agree with doesn't erase the terrible things that these companies do. Not just historically, but to this day.


What's up with the way you write the letter s? Is it a catch-all for apostrophes? I haven't seen anyone do that before, just curious.


Long story short: I decided to start using a separate laptop for work/tech stuff. Setting it up has been a bit of a pain: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/14vzvex/on_hp_la...

To answer your question specifically, I'm used to "English (intl, with AltGr dead keys)" but in Linux Mint there are like 20 options. I was trying "US, intl, AltGr Unicode combining" or perhaps "US, intl, with dead keys" or such. (I've tried about a dozen in the last 2 days.) Instead of an apostrophe, they were generating what could become an accent mark, a stress mark or diacritic depending on the next letter. On "with AltGr dead keys" you must use right alt+apostrophe for that effect. (The quotation marks would do the same thing.)

Anyway, the keyboard lets me type things like þðßáœßðfhëü´6´^¨¼²³¤` with 2 buttons like shift to make a capital! This is good for German, Spanish and French, but Hungarian and Romanian require 3 buttons, then a 4th which is more tedious. left alt shift 5 = ş ţ romanian left alt shift 3 = ā lines for latin left alt shift 2 = ű ő - hungarian long umlaut

If you really want to learn about ways to enter writing systems, this is a wild ride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...


On some keyboard layouts, pressing the quote mark starts a modifyer and then depending on the layout the following character is combined with the quote mark. Most English layouts don't include ś in this, but some Eastern European (?) languages use that character more often and so include them in this modifyer shortcut.


I honestly didn't expect the explanation of that to be as interesting as it is! I had no idea...


Oracle has got the history and continues the same history, including the lawyers. You know why? The entire business is a cult structured around their majority owner, Larry who has never stepped away from the business.




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