First: Thanks A LOT for that huge list. Great work, it really is.

However, for the sake of other minds I want to point out that I have huge issues with a lot of the points raised in some of those articles (I only read some of them) and that debunking is a harsh and inappropriate term in such contested waters.

Some of those ideas and facts kept me awake at night and I disagree with many of those facts which I find misleading. Anti-propaganda is also propaganda.

Here, I only want to be the one that shows that not everyone is agreeing or ignorant, for the sake of other readers.

Wait! Are you saying that capitalism will not fight the climate disruption despite it being way way way more expensive than investing in a healthier future?

Are you saying that we will keep investing in fossil fuels despite them being more expensive than renewables?

How are we gonna explain this? 🤦

A few things come to mind, that I particularly liked but as everyone else already stated, self-help is a highly individualistic endeavor. So it depends on you and also the topics you are interested in. I do not like self-help books that tell you what to do but rather explain how things are and let you figure your design out by yourself. With that disclaimer:

• Why we sleep - Matthew Walker: (thanks so much, I found this gem recommended somewhere here on lemmy and it was eye-opening/eye-closing for me). This should be taught in school but sleep is basically highly underrated in our society.
• The mind illuminated - Culadasa John Yates: IMO the best book on meditation without all the esoteric stuff
• The subtle art of not giving a fuck - Mark Manson (not really that amazing, but it was the right thing for me to read at some point)

Not sure this qualifies as “self-help” but more as “helpful”…

Thanks for mentioning ADNW. I never heard of them and I am honestly puzzled. All their arguments seem to have been used in the development of Neo2 already and their website mentions how Neo2 uses a similar approach and the also call themselves something with “Neo” without anywhere talking about a) what’s the difference b) why are they not content with Neo2 c) why they also call themselves Neo-ish.

No criticism that someone else builds an ergonomic keyboard, actually it is very cool that other people try to optimize it on their own. But then why not come up with a new name and compare it to what’s already there? (Comparing to QWERTZ any random distribution of keys should do better IMO).

In a less aggressive tone: ADNW seems cool. I guess in quantities it should be definitely in the same order of optimization as Neo2 which is quite good. Neo2 wins for me with two arguments (but mostly because I already use it, I guess): It is already out there in any major linux distro and I get all the additional layers without any tweaking necessary. Neo2 has nicer esthetics and symmetry in addition to being ergonomic: Look at the vowels and umlauts, look at CH, CK. None of this would be convincing myself, so it is all about which one you think is prettier and more useful for you.

do you have an ANSI or ISO keyboard? Major difference is the “<>|” key in the bottom left on the ISO keyboard. If you don’t have that, then you should still have the right Alt key (AltGr) that works as Mod4. However, neo works best on an ISO keyboard with that “<>|”-key

Good point.

Apparently there is NeoQwertz and NeoQwerty, which are available in some distros (can confirm for manjaro). You might have to look under “German”. For Arch, I don’t think it is there, took me a while to find the keymap there. Though I am currently unable to find the NeoQwerty keymap online. Sorry, documentation seems to be only available in German: https://neo-layout.org/Benutzerhandbuch/Linux/

I guess with regard to ergonomics, dvorak might be better than neo, especially since it is optimized for english. I guess the most obvious difference are “Y” and “Z” which have extremely different frequencies in English and German. However, when we use a scale of 1-10 of ergonomics, qwertz/qwerty/azerty probably ranks a solid -5, while dvorak and neo are somewhere at 9 at 8.5… With regard to coding, neo beats dvorak by orders of magnitude, though. Maybe the optimum is then using dvorak with neo layers 3 and 4 ;-)

there rarely is a good time to learn a new layout. As I said, it takes a month of dedication and cursing your brain and me. On the bright side, I know one person who added layers 3 and 4 to their qwerty keyboard just in the middle of the project and did fine. Another person I know completely changed from qwertz to neo during his phd… so as long as you are not suffering from harsh deadlines, it is doable.

I’d announce a follow-up series featuring George Weasley turning new Dark Lord to revive his brother and make the world a more “entertaining” (add Joker laughter here) place.

Alternatively I’d highlight that HPMOR http://www.hpmor.com/ has the much better storyline. Haters gonna hate, everyone else will fall for it. And never shall you read the original Harry Potter with your naive eyes again.