It is pretty insane that Windows still uses regional encodings in 2020's, instead of switching to UTF8 everywhere.
My pet theory is everyone who cares moved to Mac OS (or Linux, or WSL) and the only people who write Windows native apps are the ones who learned this long time ago and don't want to switch.
I seem to remember being able to change the system encoding to utf8, and the system time to utc, in order to work better with dual boot. But I haven't run Windows as a primary OS in several years now.
It's funny, that for a while I would setup windows and create the first user with my desired username, then rename to my proper name. Mostly because of this kind of issue.
Worse, is that with the "windows account" bs, my email starting with me@mydomain, the username directory is "me"
edit: One minor tip, I'll always make my home directory in windows my first quick access shortcut in the side bar, and my wsl home directory the second.
As another Pole I have to agree. Using anything but ASCII is setting up yourself to have to deal with this kind of issues at some point. JB might or might not fix it in the future, but besides them there are still going to be tens of different pieces of software that still fail to do so.
> The first idea was to change the username to one that does not contain Polish characters. It turned out that Windows does not rename the user’s folder when changing the username. Manually renaming the folder was not an option. This way I could corrupt my profile in the system.
But yeah, I wouldn't ever create a user profile on any OS with a non-ASCII name in the first place. It's a footgun that will get you sooner or later.
That may not suffice. My wife has a hyphen in her legal name, and even today, many companies' systems cannot deal with such a thing, or, worse, store it with the hyphen in one place and drop it in another, resulting in strange errors.
My girlfriend is from Spain and we very recently had our first child. Born in Spain.
My last name has a Norwegian “ø”.
My girlfriend has a Spanish “ñ” in her last name.
Here in Spain we decided to register the name of our child using simply “o” in place of “ø” for the last name that comes from me. For the last name that came from her we used “ñ”.
When we arrive in Norway we will register him there with the proper “ø” but here in Spain his name will remain having “o” in its place. Just like how I’ve taken to writing just “o” in place of “ø” in my name when ordering packages to be delivered to me here in Spain.
What we do about the “ñ” when registering him in Norway we will see. Depends on their computer systems. If they can enter “ñ” we will use that. If they can’t then he will have some replacement like maybe “n”. Either way, that part of his name will remain as “ñ” in Spain.
My pet theory is everyone who cares moved to Mac OS (or Linux, or WSL) and the only people who write Windows native apps are the ones who learned this long time ago and don't want to switch.