> And it also doesn't break the ' and ` keys, which US international breaks on Windows, since you have to type them twice to get the regular character.

You can also hit the space key after those characters (or other modifiers like " or ~) to get just the character and without a space after. I find it a lot easier than the Mac-approach, but YMMV.

In practice, I type those characters on their own much more often than I type them for French characters, so having to press more keys for the French ones makes more sense than the other way around.

There's also the fact that I have to type those characters in places where I don't have fancy entry systems (drive unlock passwords, rescue environments), while I don't type French in those places, so it also makes more sense for muscle memory.

Ah yeah, I generally just switch between US and US-Intl when I need to move to French. Since you can do it with Win+Space, it's pretty convenient, though I do sometimes trigger it on accident.

I don't use windows often enough to have gotten the hang of how it handles layout switching. I think, by default, it's supposed to handle them "per app". Which, in my case, sounds great: I need French for Outlook / Teams, and English everywhere else. Somehow I always seemed to type expecting the wrong layout. So I've looked for a way to have a single one which works everywhere.

Windows doesn't natively support the Mac behavior. I had to find some layout that almost does it, with the caveat that it uses alt-gr instead of mac's alt, which isn't exactly the same nor in the same spot. So I had to pile another utility on top that modifies the WIN/Menu keys to send alt-gr. Luckily, it was also able to move win to caps. So now, aside from the "weird" altgr, I'm happy enough with my keyboard under windows.