Why Linux?

To start, let me back up some 20 years to the beginning of my professional career, to talk about keyboard layouts. Bear with me. This does play into my decision to try Linux, but not in the way you might first think. In the early 1980s, I chanced to read two or three articles in relatively close succession about the history and merits of the Dvorak keyboard layout. Until then, I'd done all my typing in the QWERTY layout, and it had never occurred to me that other layouts were possible. Curious about Dvorak, I decided the only way to really learn about it was to try it, so I wrote a terminate-and-stay-resident program (remember TSRs?) to reinterpret my keyboard, and proceeded to immerse myself in the Dvorak layout.

Over the intervening years I've used Dvorak more often than QWERTY, though I've had to switch back and forth a few times as I went from one job to another. Using Dvorak, and having to switch back and forth a few times, has given me perspective on the issue of keyboard layout that few others have. I've been on both sides of the fence, I know what it's like to switch, I know how it feels to be using a minority layout in a QWERTY world, and I know firsthand what the benefits of Dvorak really are, at least in my own experience.

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