I just wanted to point out that you can use Windows 10 in Catalan. The language pack may be installed directly from the language preferences dialog. Support for Office also exists.

In another note, more frustrating for me is how many websites don't respect my browser's language preferences. I prefer Catalan, and English otherwise --BTW if you feel like criticizing this option, which I am completely entitled to, take into account that I live abroad and my kids don't understand Spanish, or the case of people in Northern Catalonia who certainly shouldn't be expected to understand Spanish--, but I keep getting Spanish instead of English when Catalan is not available. We also keep getting ads in Spanish that completely miss the target audience.

Google also really thinks that I will be really interested in contents from the Spanish Wikipedia by preferring it over the equivalent Catalan or English articles, even when it doesn't literally match my search query.

Oh, and my "OK Google" search in Android has the funnies behavior. Let's take a simple question about the weather as an example.

- With Catalan as the search language -> ask in Catalan -> no information about the weather - With Catalan as the search language -> ask in English -> information about the weather in Spanish. Some of the search UI is in Catalan and some in Spanish, including the actual weather information. Voice response is in Spanish.

So I have to use English, which is fine, but just shows how in terms of l18n we still have a long way to go.

Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

A quick Google suggest it has a) more native speakers than English, b) more total speakers than English, with only Chinese ahead of it.

That must dampen enthusiasm for learning other languages.

Also, could you provide a source for the fact that English literacy rates are actually decreasing? I find that difficult to believe.

I didn't say the English literacy rates are decreasing, I'm simply stating that they speak a whole more English in the north than in the south as far as young people go and it generally surprises me how bad English among young people here is. Is it because while they do learn English in schools, they don't practice it enough? Certainly can't be the case in Barcelona, right?

And as I understand it, it's improving. Catalonia's fortunate in that most people are bilingual to begin with, which is known to ease the introduction of other languages considerably.

I also believe Windows 10 has a good Catalan translation although I have never used it.