For the record, it's a stark pronunciation difference as ł has drifted to a very different "w" sound
Łódź
Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.
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".
Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Serbian Љ?
Conservative Ł would still be distinct.
The problem is some software just has problems with non-English alphabets because, roughly saying, all the software was meant to only process English text historically and much of it still has not been fixed. Users of non-latin-based alphabets have been accustomed to this and have no problem writing "Иван" as "Ivan" (despite it normally reads even more different in English, more correct phonetic transliteration would be "Eevan"). Heck they even spell "Семён" (~"Semyon", the Russian counterpart to English "Simon") as "Semen" X-). But the users of diacriticized Latin somehow get surprised with this.
If I could travel back in time to when ASCII was designed and give the engineers a hint I would ask them to add first-class diacritics to their design so anybody would be able to add the slash for Ł, the umlaut for Ü, Ö or whatever using an extra byte. Sadly, even today we mostly encode Ü as a letter absolutely distinct to U rather than a combination of the latter with the umlaut even though Unicode allows doing this the latter way AFAIK.
It was a long process of L-vocalization [0] that started around XVI century. The first segment of the population to be affected by it were peasants (it is also one of the reasons why the original sound quality of «ł» survived relatively long among Polish artists in early XX century as a sign of professionalism, similarly to English’s Mid-Atlantic accent [1]).
I suspect that L-vocalization’s proliferation was aided by multiple wars, partitions and occupations that followed, which caused many waves of both natural and forced internal migration and disappearance of most dialectal differences.
According to [2](PL) the pronunciation of «ł» as /w/ was codified as the standard around XIX/XX in both informal and formal settings. There are still remaining populations using the old sound quality, but they are mostly confined to the areas in proximity to other Slavic languages.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-vocalization [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent [2]: http://www.dialektologia.uw.edu.pl/index.php?l1=leksykon&lid...