Comment 23 for bug 518056

Hello Mario,

Serbian, for instance, has also the č, ć, ž, đ, š characters. None of them can be typed in a US keyboard.
That is because Serbians have their own keyboard layout (and that is available within the options
when one installs a linux distribution). It makes no sense to keep the accented c letter if its only use
will be typing the names of someone in a language that may have many other characters, so that
you would be able to type only a part of the name correctly :-).

This is the same for every other language in Europe having the accented c letter in its alfabet.

If someone in Serbia or Poland use the US keyboard layout, which they may use, they certainly have
to do a lot adaptations to be able to write in their languages. Probably if they use that keyboard
is for programming only.

The situation is different for Portuguese, in which the ONLY adaptation required is the 'c = ç, and
the keyboard can be used (and IS used) like that. There is a Brazilian Portuguese layout, and
the corresponding physical keyboard, and those work just fine. The issue is that in Brazil, at least,
many, many people buy they computers abroad or imported ones, which come with the
US-layout. The historical and practical adaptation is the 'c=ç, and that is what is used by default
for US-keyboards in portuguese in other operating systems.

Not having a keyboard layout to chose from in which the 'c corresponds to ç has been a great
headache for people trying to use linux and trying to convince other to use it, you may imagine
how frustrating is to present someone a alterantive OS in which they can't type a frequently
used character the practical and usual way.

I have no idea if those bugs are related. I know that in some recent instalations there are signs
(signs, because some people still report problems in some applications) that the 'c=ç option
is been adopted. I insisted in many blogs and here that the ideal solution is simply to include
yet another keyboard layout called "US-International with dead-keys (cedilla)", but of course
what I want is not traduced easily in other people implementing that, and sometimes I have
received feedbacks on more technically skilled people saying that any solution to this problems
involves complications far beyound my understanding.