There are people complaining that autocorrect is racist because it tends to modify the
names of people of non-english background
That seems a bit far fetched to me, but I imagine they could stop using the algorithm on names .
Is this real , or is it a case of looking for something to complain about?
If it is real, can linux get in first with a fix?
I don’t believe it is racist. It was coded by someone or a team with a certain background(s).
How can code know the names of all the people from all over the world? Should it be updated from time to time. Yes! I am sure the code gets lots of names wrong, not just Africans, but also Asian and middle east.
I’ve seen autocorrect and type-ahead ballsup Anglo / Western European names too…
A simple rule might be if it’s in the middle of a sentence - and is capitalised, LEAVE IT ALONE! But what to do if it’s the first word in a sentence?
I’ve actually had autocorrect correct “Austrian” to “Australian”…
But I guess it would never try to autocorrect Giovanni to John, or Pierre to Peter? What about Ian (Scots), that’s yet another form of English “John”, then there’s Irish Sean, French Jean, Germanic Jan or Johannes, Russian / Slavic Ivan… What a mess!
I had a Croatian acquaintance whose name was M.Rakovic… it became Mr. A.Kovic
Autocomplete annoys me . I turn it off where possible.
I remember when tcsh first appeared… it introduced autocomplete to csh. I thought it was an unnecessary imposition.
Personally i like auto correct and find the suggestions helpful most of the time.
Not become an issue with names but i generally write to english or french common names not really tried strange combinations.
What does help me is being english language user most of the time, if i am writing in french with french keyboard and language settings then it auto prompts me the word which is really useful with accents.
For example
Ete
Changes to été
The word for summer
Bloody accents, glad i am from yorkshire where we speak rit gud … no accents
Bloody accents alright! I’m a metal head and forever searching for vowels with an umlaut on them for bands like Blue Öyster Cult or Motörhead 
or even consonants like Spın̈al Tap
But then I gotta be careful - 'cause some things like adb-sync (Android “rsync” CLI tool) barf on accented chars!
Accents cause me all sorts of issues over file and image names when trying to use or insert them on website pages. They convert to ascii so are either lost or just dont load.
This is new to me.
I thought, if you were going to use a languuge that had accents, you had to set up your keyboard and locale properly… and then you were restricted to that language. Correct?
I dont see any way one can work in 2 languages simultaneously, or easily switch between them. Tell me if I am wrong?
No problem with keyboard or wordprocessing just flick the language button and it changes.
Have libre office and linux with the two language versions installed, grammar dictionary easy stuff.
Occasionally the menus dont reflect the language but that does not bother me file edit etc or
fichier Edition not much in it.
marché d’été … summer market is the issue
Servers dont like the accents for files or images when linking on urls or http
Try naming a folder then navigate to it
Bit like capital and lower case they are not the same.
I dont get involved in spanish or german accents but that adds to the issues
Where is this language button… I suppose in the keyboard config or inside libreoffice.
Never thought about internet site names… I suppose I dont access non-english sites.
So to reach a French site, I have to type whatever accented vowels they use in its name… or it will not match. I thought internet ignored capitals?
Filenames… that is different… they are case sensitive… so I suspect they are accent sensitive.
How does this relate to Unicode…, I set mine to UTF8 and english.
Does linux actually use unicode internally (eg for filenames) or is it just for communication?
I really know nothing about this.
Its in libre office
A few years back I wrote a macro to flick the language for spelling and grammar between the french or english for when i am typing
On my tablet I have a button on my keyboard to flick between two.
Site names tend not to use accents
Searching can be a pain in another language
I dont know much about the last part utf 8 would be interested in knowing more