I would probably do without utf8, but there are lot of committers on SBo with names containing strange chars and I had to handle those with vim and on the command line

No, only a minority.

The minority being, "the ones that haven't ended up disembowelled on brian's sacrificial alter during one of his Slackware Release Day divination rituals".

Yeah, I've found Punjabi-speaking cat's entrails give the most accurate results. Not sure why.

I switched to UTF-8 around slackware 12.0. As a maths student I found it much nicer having easy access to chars like: σπΣφθ∫∞√≠→⇔ℝ∃⊆≡⁵⁶, through an elaborate ~/.Xmodmap, than writing pseudo-TeX in e-mail, web forums and such. I also took some evening classes in russian which pretty much sealed the deal for UTF-8.
The only real problem I've had is with *TeX, `pdflatex` from the tetex package worked fine for writing utf8-swedish with the use of "\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}", but would break on \verb and \lstinputlisting. With XeLaTeX from SBo's texlive I had trouble with russian. Finally setteling on lualatex I still occasionally run into some esoteric problem with mixed languages/scripts.
My $LANG is empty though and LC_MESSAGES set to C, I much prefer having all programs use their deafult language (mostly en_US, I guess), than a mix between non-translated en_US, badly translated sv_SE and properly translated sv_SE. Particularly when dealing with error messages. I also have LC_COLLATE and LC_NUMERING set to C, collation for the reason ttk mentioned in post #6, and numeric to avoid the clash between the swedish comma-as-decimal-mark and programming languages' period-as-decimal-mark.

UTF8 is good. sometimes i work with old cyrillic codepages ( russian lang) - cp866 (DOS cyr cp), win-1251 ( win cyr cp), KOI8-R ( old unix cyr standart), and so on, but i try to convert them all to utf8, for no problems with different cp in future.
most of that fiiles is books in .txt

yes, i encounter some problems in midnight commander tables, when choosed unicode as system default language.
in that case launch mc throught
LANG=C mc
helps

Thanks for introducing me to this command. Being in the USA and struggling just to figure out one language, I'm mostly ignorant of the wide range of language facilities available in modern computers.

It looks like I guessed correctly when voting and the Slackware default is 8859-1.

EDIT: Thanks to comet.berkeley. I wasn't interested in the quoted portion of post # 41 and missed the content of your post. brianL pointed this out in post 54.

Oh. Well learn something new every day they say. I've only ever seen it on my UEFI machine, must have gotten lucky on my old machine, or maybe something changed in the Nvidia driver or the kernel, or something. Regardless, I can't put vga=normal or anything like that on my kernel line or I just get a black screen, and I've read that problem is an efi problem, on devtalk.nvidia.com unless I misunderstood.

I can't claim credit for it. I got it from here (post #41):

The black screen must be a UEFI problem, but that warning is an NVidia vs framebuffer problem. Two problems for the price of one.

en_US
because I use mc.
because I spell like an American.
because I've never needed to know another language.

as any famous character says "what number of languages you know, that times you be a human".
maybe a bit wrong translation, because i'm very bad in english, but i hope, majority understand, what i mean

2 members found this post helpful.

Same here regarding LC_MESSAGES, our local computer terminology is just too inconsistent and overall not clear to me. I honestly tried using localized KDE for a few years, but had to revert to English, because it drove me mad trying to find something in System Settings (or any other configuration dialog).

Я понимаю.

your russian looks far better than my english
long time not receive any mails from you