I can’t understand why, but as a Dvorak typist I run into problems with GNOME. GNOME has a nice feature to switch the keyboard lay-out from the default, QWERTY, to the Dvorak layout.
But, it doesn’t (reliably) work for Ctrl and Alt keys. I am not sure what causes the troubles, but according to this bug report at gnome.org it is due to some low-level interpretation of the keyboard strokes.
What worries me is that it takes so long for such a report to get handled with. It is a report dating from 2005 and still (10/2008) has the status NEW.
I hope to be able to report progress on this at any time