Yes to Unicode in usernames
Posted May 10, 2026 13:09 UTC (Sun) by ASCII_is_shit (guest, #183723)Parent article: Debian opens a can of username worms
I don’t think much of ASCII restrictions. Usernames should always be in Unicode. Yes, there are risks, but anyone using non-ASCII characters in usernames will already be aware of those risks. I would simply include warnings that problems may arise as a result. Besides, Unicode is no longer a novelty and is very well integrated everywhere. I’ve been using non-ASCII characters in usernames (-badname) on my Linux systems for 10 years and have never had any problems because of it.
Anyone who is so convinced of the merits of ASCII should simply stick to A-Z, but should allow others the option of using non-ASCII characters (after all, no one is forced to use non-ASCII names). To become more competitive with Windows, all modern Linux distributions should support non-ASCII characters in usernames, including in the GUI (as is the case with the installation of Debian).
There’s always a lot of whingeing that non-ASCII characters can break old applications. But programmes that are so old they have problems with Unicode wouldn’t run anyway due to unmet dependencies (I’d be happy if Ubuntu 22 software managed to make the leap to Ubuntu 24).