I think the title says it all. I’m in a cyber café in Paris and I have to type on a stupid keyboard. I can forgive the French for being Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys, but forcing me to type at an escargot’s pace is reason enough to declqre war right now! It’s baguettes at dawn in front of Le Tour Eiffel :mad:
Do French keyboards make you double-post, too? 
French postcqrds mqke up for it qll.
qll your q’s qre belong to nous.
I’ve had to fix French laptops at work. They’re infuriating. Most of the letters are in the right places, but just enough are in the wrong places to make touch-typing impossible without a good bit of practice.
I agree, they’re a pain in the qss.
So is it common for cyber cafés in Europe not to allow guests to remap the keyboard?
I was surprised upon coming to my university to find that the library computers had a popup menu in the Windows 2000 system tray which offered a choice of different keyboard layouts, among them two Chinese variants. Imagine that; the student body has enough Chinese students to justify offering two Chinese keyboard layouts on the public Windows machines!
The Sun workstations in the math building are a different story. I had to manually edit my login profile to automatically change the X keyboard map to Dvorak, and that only takes effect after I have authenticated myself to the X display manager, which by default interprets keycodes according to the QWERTY keyboard map.
And then there are the German kezboards, which reverse the “y” and the “z.” And don’t get me started about the weird kezstroke combination zou need to produce the “@” sign for email addresses!!
Way back when I worked help desk at a bank, a user, an elder gentleman who used his computer only for email, called to day he could not get into his email from his machine. It worked from other machines, but not his. He was quite sure he was typing his password correctly, and since he could type it correctly across the aisle, i believed him. Turns out somehow his keyboard was set to French. His password had an “a” in it so it failed each time. Since he only used the PC for email, and his name was already saved in his profile, he never saw the “a” was coming out as a “q”!
I heard a story once about a user who couldn’t log in while standing up. If he sat down it was fine, but he would get ‘incorrect password’ while standing. The guy was a touch typist and didn’t look at the keys while sitting, but standing up he would hunt and peck the password. It turns out that two keytops had been switched and it didn’t click with him that the letter he was pressing wasn’t in its usual place.