It's not strange to localize your name. In ASL for example, you could sign your English name letter-by-letter, but it's much more common to have a totally new sign for your name - usually a word combined with the first letter of your name. Taking part in a different system often means taking on another name.

it was 30 years ago when i discovered that it doesn’t really matter what my name is. the system i’m interacting with expects my name to be “john” or something like that. so i let it be.

30 years later and i completely dropped all non-latin chars from my name in any and all forms. from airplane tickets to passport to you name it.

and you know what? no one cared about non-latin. not even the government. i loled when i actually realised.

i’ve encountered zero issues ever since.

and it’s been the same for lots of my friends. they just adopted some western name. case closed, no more issues.

it all depends on who much importance you attribute to your name. for me it’s always been a random variable. for others it’s a matter of pride. but to the “system” it will be a “random list of chars”, sometimes latin, other times utf.

My name contains non-Latin characters (apparently strange as we use a Latin language), but 40 years of working with computers I learned to avoid using the original form and always convert to ASCII; yes, it is not my name, but my pride and sense of entitlement are not hurt at all.

Sometimes it is better to avoid being hit by the bus even if you are right.

Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".

The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, German, almost all latin-based Slavic alphabets and pretty much everywhere. I bet almost every Mikołaj drops the slash happily (some probably even change the whole name to Nicholas which is the English counterpart) if they get a passport of an anglophone country.

Nevertheless I find it absurd it's 2021 and they still have to. It's almost 30 years since the introduction of Unicode in Windows NT and NTFS, probably also close to that in Java. Pretty much every serious programming language or database supports Unicode by default today.

I believe it's a bug in some app in the toolchain as Windows file system API is perfectly capable of handling non-ASCII symbols. I always cared to avoid using non-ASCII symbols and spaces in my paths (incl. always installing almost everything to a custom directory outside "Program Files") but c'mon, how many decades do we need to develop handling these reliably?

I would also consider Windows' inability to optionally change the actual home directory name and distinguish between the user's full (display) name and their "username" (which are 2 distinct properties in Linux) "feature-bugs".

Interestingly, this particular change would work in cyrillic :)

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.

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.

So, what does 阿部明仁 do in this case?

Polish may be close enough that an approximation is available in English, but there's an awful lot of languages that don't have a large overlap with English characters.

In the Asian case above, if someone with that name did try to "convert to English" they are ironically just as likely to end up with Ａｋｉｈｉｔｏ Ａｂｅ as the ASCII, which will be just as broken!

"You're holding it wrong"

The problem is the technology, not the user using it in a reasonable way. ł is older than computers and the only reason computers struggle with it is lack of foresight or choosing to make things harder for most of the world by some of the people involved early on.