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I had formed alot of bad habits with Qwerty.Breaking away from them was hard when reverting was possible.

I still remember a bit of Qwerty, but, I can no longer type very fast with it. I often look for keys. This is a drawback at school where having to switch the keyboard around is a tad annoying.

I type much faster in Dvorak than I ever did in qwerty, likely because I learned it so systematicly. I get really good scores speed typing. I do most everything with command line interfaces, and I also use vim. The hjkl keys were no longer intuitive, but I quickly got used to this.

Now I could go back and learn qwerty the right way from the ground up. Haven’t found much reason to though.

TIP: Don’t re arrange the physical key labels on your keyboard. If anything, arrange them so they make no sense in either Qwerty or Dvorak. I honestly think trial and error hunting with your fingers is more effective, even if it makes learning more difficult at first.

When I was young, I used Windows, but I always wanted to strip it down to the bare metal. Unfortunately, (fortunately?) Windows doesn’t make that easy.
So, I tried linux. Everything can be thinned down and customized. I was so excited with it, I switched to linux from scratch. Now I have everything built with debugging symbols (actually, I have a fast kernel, and a debugging kernel), so when something goes wrong, I know exactly what happened. (Or atleast, I can get an idea, and have half a hope of understanding what goes on, limited by my ability.)

However, even if you aren’t into customizing and solving your own problems, free software has huge advantages.

Non-free software often goes obsolete and no one bothers to maintain it. Everyone using Windows or MS Office is pretty much forced to upgrade every few years. Anything substantial that is added to a commercial program usually has to wait for the next release.

Why pay for software in the first place? Why run a program that won’t disclose what it tells your computer to do?

Windows emulation and hardware driver support on free operating systems is much more mature than it used to be. I think, with a little bit of time, anyone could switch. In the long run I think it’s inevitable that non-free software will be the oddball.

Or boolean logic, or bitwise operations in programming and digital electronics hardware.
Translating machine mnemonics to opcodes. Odometer arithmetic, endianess.
Learning some file formats, or sniffing some packets.

Balanced ternary is much cooler.