[Libbum]

I am competent in both dvorak and workman alternative layouts. Both took approximately two weeks of use to not be completely awkward, annoying and slow. Then probably about another month to be up to scratch with my qwerty speed.

Switching between the three layouts is completely painless for me, so in that sense I'm fine with using other peoples' keyboards or swap layouts on the fly (if you're worried about being confused if you need to swap back and forward in the future).

Specifically connected to dvorak: I found that the uppe right region of the keyboard is required more frequently than it should be, so your right pinky finger ends up performing more tasks than all others. This I found quite annoying - and one of the reasons why workman is now my default layout.

What works for you though will of course be different, but I do think changing from qwerty is worthwhile. So keep at it! It definitely gets better.