[atoav]

Don't get me wrong, I think using UTF-8 everywhere is how things should be.

But this is not a "let's just" or "why don't we" type of endeavor. This is a major undertaking, and as such people are needed who (A) think it is worth the effort and (B) are willing to follow through with all the consequences.

Open Source software lives from contributions and if you're not willing to do it, why should others spend years of their lives for it?

In the end this is a question of: are the benefits worth the effort? What do we win? Where do things get simpler? Where more complicated? How do you pull it off if half the distributions use UTF8 and the other half uses the legach way? How would tooling deal with this split? etc.

[atoav]

To add a little bit of context:

You know what I think would be way worse than todays reduced characterset usernames with some special rules or "just" using utf-8 for them?

Both. Imagine a world where some usernames are UTF-8 some are not and it is hard to figure out which is which. That would be worse than just leaving things as they are.

Avoiding that situation makes pulling the whole thing off even harder, since there needs to be a high amount of coordination between many projects, distros etc.