My experience is it’s not worth it unless you’re looking for maybe a one-handed keyboard and want to type blindly (like, send a quick text while talking to someone without looking at your phone much).
Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the default AOSP keyboard and Gboard. 70 WPM is more than good enough for texting, Slack, emails, and posting on social media.
I just Googled “typing test” and picked the first result which was typingtest.com. I don’t know if it’s good or accurate but it checks out for the score I expected.
A bit of an addendum: I think the limiting factor of a mobile keyboard is going to be that you have 1-2 fingers available for use rather than all 10.
A lot of those alternative keyboards seem to rely on some swiping gestures or drawing symbols. That’s good when you’re not looking at it as it’s very tolerant to misalignment, but if you already move fast and precisely, that feels like it would get in the way.
Looking at my fingers while I type, I’m already moving my thumbs as fast as I can without getting too sore: where it goes next doesn’t matter, it’s the same amount of time. Having to press and then move and release, in theory should only slow me down because by the time I finish the drag motion and lift the finger, I would have just moved my finger over the next key and pressed it. So that kind of layering is out of the window.
I can’t think of a way to type faster without involving mnemonics and chorded entry, but with two fingers you don’t gain that much.
Also I feel like the bottleneck there is how fast I can think of what to say next anyway.
While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.
Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.
If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.
As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)
I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.
(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)
Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.
I used a non standard keyboard a long time ago and while it did deliver, the most important thing I learned is that non standard things tend to disappear and the time spent learning it was wasted.
There’s a public modlog with all removed posts and comments along with the reason, so you can get the pitchforks when a mod goes authoritarian (or, more often, have a look at what a complaining user actually meant by “freedom of expression”).
Years ago I was working construction on a house and an iron clamp (around 2 or three pounds) under tension with a chain snapped and flew towards me and hit me in the forehead hard enough it spun me ass over tea kettle off of a scaffold where I belly flopped onto concrete about 6 or 7 feet down. I woke up about ten minutes later with paramedics around me laying in a pool of blood. I was air lifted by helicopter to the city around 80 miles away.
I still have a nice 2 inch scar on my head from where it hit, but thankfully I have a nice thick skull and I didn’t get any brian dabblage :)
Thanks, It’s all pretty frazzled there due to the extra long day I had but it grows pretty fast and doesn’t usually listen to me at the best of times lol… If I remember correctly that was only a week or two of growth since I had last shaved.
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