Short answer: yes

Long answer: While there are many decent optimized layouts, Colemak achieves the best balance of advantages and disadvantages. Dvorak wins (marginally) on being a "recognised" standard, but is harder to learn, makes common shortcut relearning more difficult, and has some well documented issues such as its pinky L key. There are other layouts that change pretty much everything in pursuit of optimization, like MTGAP or the carpalx one, but I think these end up suffering from being harder to learn, while offering doubtful benefit over Colemak. On the other end of the scale are layouts like Asset and Norman which are easier to learn, but are somewhat less optimized, especially when it comes to same-finger bigrams. Workman has one or two interesting qualities, but has its own disadvantages, but in any case it's benefits  are nullified by Mod-DH, which fixes the most commonly cited criticisms of vanilla Colemak.

Probably more important still, is that Colemak also has an active community, and is well known and recognised (for a keyboard layout). And there are supported variants and add-ons such as Mod-DH (i.e. Colemak-CAW) and Extend, both of which I highly recommend.

For fresh learners, I'd say the choice is pretty clear in favour of Colemak these days.

I learned dvorak some time when I was at the uni, and it really made my pinkey finger hurt, I didn't like it very much. Also in my biased way I didn't enjoy the feeling of typing in dvorak in any way better than what I do in Colemak. The flow that one gets in colemak is something that I haven't really managed to find in any other layouts before.

I'd also suggest that while you're starting to learn, go with the angle wide dh mod at once, I did it the not smart way, and went through standard colemak first. And I kind of regret that I did, since caw is so much more comfortable to type with. One thing I don't think the others were mentioning about caw is that it makes typing on a laptop keyboard so much more comfortable since your hands aren't pushing your shoulders together as much, it really does make a difference.

Everybody telling about not having issues with lateral finger movements, but the thing is that whoever tried Mod-DH do not come back to vanilla Colemak (to be honest I heard about one case of returning back so far). This is not a problem, relearning from Colemak to Mod-DH takes just couple weeks at max.

If you already touch typing, you can pick another layout way faster than a person who never touch type. We are agreed here that touch typing ability is some personal trait that some people have more and some less. It is layout independent.

Start to teach children in school something other than qwerty is the only way to end qwerty’s domination. But that will unlikely to happen. The task in its scale is comparable to converting all countries to left side driving (this way, convert majority to what minority use).

About one-third of world's population live in countries that drive on the left, so right-hand driving is not as dominant as you'd think. I'd be totally happy if Colemak or other optimized layouts were anywhere near even one-third coverage!!

Going off-topic, looking to the map of left and right driving countries https://www.worldstandards.eu/cars/list … countries/ , among 266 countries in the list, there are 76 where left side driving is used. It includes all tiny caribean and pacific nations where left side is used a lot, and UK is counted as England, Scotland, Wells, and Northern Ireland. Talking about population, Indian subcontinent is the major contributor to the left side.
Also here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c … storic.png there are a lot of countries converted from left to right, but I see only  Namibia converted from right to left.
My point was not about population, but that around the world the right side driving seems like more popular idea among different nations.
BTW, I do not mind about left side driving and had experience of it during my vacation time, unlike many of people around me, who never tried that. I may tell that it took way longer time for me to get used to Fahrenheit instead of Celsius (literally years) than drive on the left side (three days).

That is you and me and people at this forum know that pretty much any layout is better than qwerty. For qwerty apologists this is not obvious. For them the situation is exactly as with the side to drive - left vs right, no real difference, why to change? The only reason why different countries changed left to right, or right to left side driving, is to be like their neighbor countries and do not switch when crossing the border or to buy cars without adopting them for other side.
When all the world is using qwerty, there is no such motivation either.

PS. Living in US it is as hard to find a car with manual transmission as the purple unicorn :)  But I used to drive stickshift, and then I rent a car with stick during my vacation in Ireland, and I agree to you that having gearstick on the left makes more sense. Not even because of the clutch on the same side, but because when driving "hand on the wheel and one on the stick" it is better to have you right hand on the wheel (been right handed of course).

You nailed it! Just the thing is that 99% of people don't give a shit either!
To be exact, that was an attempt to introduce something other than qwerty in schools:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLUM_keyboard
https://forum.colemak.com/topic/49-plum-keyboard/
https://web.archive.org/web/20060701000 … //plum.bz/

The site is down, the idea is dead, as I understand there was some local experiment in high schools to teach typing on PLUM keyboard.
The keyboard itself is not the best to migrate to, but I still appreciate the attempt.

Unlike 16, 12 is a superior highly composite number, which brings a bunch of nice mathematical (number theoretical) properties to dozenal counting which hexadecimal lacks.

The forum of the Dozenal Society of America has a lot of interesting information on and comparisons of many number systems.

Alas, if even Colemak can't take over the world, Dozenal certainly won't. :-(

Going a bit off-topic here, but since I'm imagining myself as king of the world, I also declare:

- Messing about with clocks twice annual for "daylights savings" would be abolished.
- Dates would be written in ISO format YYYY-MM-DD.
- The year would return to starting in March, so that the sept/oct/nov/dec prefixes made sense.
- Fahrenheit would be abolished and only Celsuis (or Kelvin) used.
- I have a soft spot for miles over kilometers, so miles would still be allowed. And beer would still be allowed to be served in pints. We all have our foibles.

In fact senary (base-6) would be very nice as well.  It is also a superior highly composite number, so has similar features as dozenal, and it can actually be used for finger (not phalanges) counting on human hands, if you employ a "physical" positional notation.  1 through 5 are the fingers on your (say) right hand, and groups of six are fingers on your left.  So 1-5 is what we're used to, 6 turns over to one finger on your other hand, etc, until 35 = five sixes and five.  Much more economic use of our two hands. :-)  And base-36 is a nice "compression" base for senary, like hexadecimal is for binary.

The real problem with switching to any other number system would not be the digits or getting used to the counting & arithmetic itself though, but the conflict with the metric system, which is heavily decimal.  You'de have to redefine anything that uses factors of ten, like kilometers, ..., which would be completely impractical.

That being said, ever since learning about dozenal, I mentally group items into groups of four or six, rather than tens, when counting or sorting.  It's really much easier than ugly fives.