[peelle]

When you say you "switched" I hope that means you took the time to go through one of those touch typing tutor programs, like GNU Typist. If you do the exercises and practice, the mental drain should go away.

My experience switching to Dvorak was back in 2006. At that time I was a full time student and a part time programmer. Switching to a new layout took about a week in the evenings practicing about 30min - 1hour. I flew through the tutoring program, ymmv.

The first three months of using it in the wild were hard. I had a few big obstacles. I frequently needed campus computers, for projects and helping the GF I frequently shared computers, and muscle memory for shortcuts, vi, etc.

All of those problems have multiple solutions, and I found ways to deal with them, or ignored them until they went away. :-)