He opened it, heart racing.
He tried keyboard-autoswitch , a Ruby gem that listened to X11 events. It worked for exactly three keystrokes before confusing "cat" with "собака" and locking his keyboard into a Cyrillic loop. punto switcher linux
Then he switched to Linux.
For three weeks, Alexei became a hermit. He learned about event devices, uinput, virtual keyboards. He built a daemon that sat between his physical keyboard and the X server. Every key press passed through his filter. If the last 10 keystrokes matched a Russian word in his dictionary, he would simulate backspaces and retype the corrected version. He opened it, heart racing
On the final night, he typed "Ghbdtn mundo" — a mix of Russian typo and English. The daemon turned it into "Привет mundo." Perfect. Then he switched to Linux
It wasn't a dramatic break. No smashed hard drives or angry forum posts. Just a quiet Tuesday when he realized Windows had become a rented room, and he wanted a house he owned. He installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, chose a soothing dark theme, and felt a breath of freedom.