When you have non-standard characters in your name you quickly learn to never use them in computers since even though most systems works fine, some don't. And you can't fix all the thousands of systems your name has to interact with.

I even had trouble booking flight tickets since their security system couldn't parse my name, and then had to go through some special security check due to it returning errors. After that, never again. Not sure how they managed to do it but they had some basic rules that they used to say "no real name can look like this, this is a fake person!" and just kicked it out.

> When you have non-standard characters in your name

'standard' by what measure? Ł is more standard than X or Q in the polish alphabet.

~ Sincerely, a person whose name contains „ń” and therefore had to deal with this bullshit his entire life.

From a programmers perspective. The characters in my name are standard where I come from, but they are not standard to the international air travel security systems likely developed by Americans.

Edit: You know how aircraft travel security always transforms your name into letters from the English alphabet to parse? Yeah, it transformed my name and then the resulting string looked so bad that the system rejected that. The original name doesn't look bad, but after transformations it did...

They're not non-standard characters. They're just as much a part of the Polish alphabet as 'a' and 'b' are.

That is exactly what I meant. My name doesn't have non-standard characters either from the perspective of my home country, it is just normal letters in the alphabet, but not in the English alphabet.

I totally understand what you’re saying, but it’s also a sad state of affairs when we can’t handle “non standard characters”.

Standard characters (ie english) are only used by a small subset (maybe 5-10%) of the global population.

For a user, changing their account (probably creating a new user, since rename apparently doesn't change the directory), is something they can do.

Changing all software to respect their perfectly valid name isn't something they can do.

They shouldn't need to change their name, but if they do, they can ignore all the broken software and go about their day.

This particular user is more capable than most, and found a workaround for this particular problem, which is good... But this is not likely to be the last of the problems.

Of course it would be better if all code was bug free. But that's impossible. As a user, avoiding unicode is a pretty easy way to avoid bugs like this - its the rational thing to do.