I was using US(Altgr-Int) as my primary keyboard layout for a long time (and having to setup xkb specific keybinds for äÄüÜßöÖ and € in a separate file).
Recently after getting a new keyboard I had to change something in my xkb config file to make it work as before and when I skimmed through /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us I came across a keyboard layout which was unbeknownst to me.
>// This (altgr-weur) layout is based on combined letter frequencies
>// for English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,
>// Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish: all accented characters for
>// those languages are available through AltGr- combinations. Further
>// explanation can be found at: https://www.altgr-weur.eu/
>// - Adriaan and Enno
It's rather young, because it hasn't existed before 2015.
I ditched my previous keyboard layout immediately and I am using altgr-weur since then and will never look back. I even have French accents now! I didn't configure them before, because I was too lazy, using them too rarely to justify the 'effort' and always looked those up in a character map, copy pasting. Yikes.
What keyboard layout does Bernd use?
Once bought an english layout keyboard for 15€ when I was 16 and since then never used anything else. It is very nice for coding because you get all the < / []()@ etc. without having to press alt gr like on the german keyboard and they are all nexto each other, too.
For japanese I also use qwerty and just convert my input into characters using space, picrel 2 is twice as fast but only very few people learn and use it, like journalists.
I rarely have to text in german and if it is something serious where I can't fake äöü with ae oe ue I switch to a german layout, I can still use it well but it's not as comfy as the english one.
picrel 3 is my cyrillic layout, took me quite a while to learn well because the letters aren't written on my keys.
