On Aug 18, 2009, at 12:36 AM, Matt wrote:
> So it is not so much about *easy* vs. *hard*, but who controls the
> code running on the machine.
On my Mac bought in Japan with a Japanese keyboard I can type English, Japanese and French with a simple modification of the input system, right out of the box.
I have tried numerous times to do that on a similar machine with Debian or Ubuntu but the solutions either required that I modify the keyboard map (and thus type "in the dark") or that I code the dead- keys combination myself.
In my specific case, it _is_ about easy vs hard. And as far as multilingualism goes, Windows is about as bad as Linux. For me, the OS is just one part of the software environment, and even if my OS is not FOSS, I use the most FOSS reasonably possible.
Jean-Christophe Helary