What should we do with questions related to computing?

Question

Consider the following questions?

1. How can I type accented letters, like ç, on elementary OS?
2. How can I type accented letters?
3. How many different keyboard layouts are there for Portuguese?
4. Are there keyboard layouts with "dead keys" or do Portuguese keyboard layouts have extra keys for accented letters?
5. How do Portuguese people usually type accented letters?

(This last question is similar to a question recently asked on main: Como é que vocês digitam acentos no teclado?)

These are all related to the Portuguese language. Which of these should be on-topic here? At which point is a question related to Portuguese better asked on a sister site which deals with technology (such as Super User, StackOverflow em Português, Ask Different, Ask Ubuntu, Unix & Linux, elementary OS, etc.)?

Answer 1

At which point is a question related to Portuguese better asked on a sister site which deals with technology?

At the point in which they are not about Portuguese Language itself, but rather exclusively about stuff that's tangential or related to it instead — this seems to be the case in these examples.

Let's put it this way: what, in those examples, makes those questions on-topic? How are those about Portuguese Language itself, as a language? The answers to those questions are nothing, and they aren't, respectively. Simply look at the answers provided to the example question, and to the way the question itself is tagged.

Those are questions related to hardware, software, computers, or whatever bucket you'd like to put them in, but they're not about a language. As such, they don't have a place here. I get that they seem to be related to the Portuguese language, but they're either asking what keys you need to press to produce a certain character on your computer, or about how many possible combinations a certain device has for a language, or other such stuff — neither of these are about the language, and all of these are about how to use your computer.

So to answer your actual question, "What should we do with questions related to computing?": send 'em to a site whose focus is computing, instead of a language.

Answer 2

They are all off-topic.

They're related to the Portuguese language, but not to "discussing the finer points of the Portuguese language", as per the focus of our site on the site tour:

Portuguese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, and learners wanting to discuss the finer points of the Portuguese language.

Our target audience includes learners. But our focus does not include the learning itself, or such things as:

• Overcoming technological limitations (such as digitally writing in Portuguese) - try SuperUser;
• Techniques for memorizing those humongous verb tables - try LanguageLearning.SE;
• Questions asking for resources - try meta.

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But notice that a question does not stop fitting here just because it fits elsewhere.
There can be overlap between sites. This is natural, and not a problem.

Answer 3

Just because a question touches computing (more specifically, in those, about text input), doesn't make it automatically off-topic, even if the problem only occurs in those situations. Consider the following questions:

• What does q mean, as used in online chatting?
• What options do I have for adding POS tags to Portuguese text?
• How can I detect adjectival uses of a past participle (so I can search some corpus)?
• Which corpora with spoken Portuguese are available?
• What software is available to detect grammatical errors in a Portuguese text?
• What are the best reference Portuguese dictionaries available online?

Some of these my violate the (IMO unjustified and downright harmful) bias that for whatever reason some Stack Exchange communities have against lists, but they're all questions that either touch actual aspects of the Portuguese language or that are of special relevance specifically to Portuguese speakers/learners.

Laterally, I would also consider on-topic the following questions:

• Which handwriting script is taught to kids in Portuguese schools?
• Now that the letter k is included in Portuguese alphabet, how should it be written?

As for your example questions, the first is off-topic because it's specific about an OS (note: a question like how do I configure the Compose key in Ubuntu would also be off-topic), the second is also off-topic because it's not specific about the Portuguese language (how you type accented characters depends on the language). Note that keyboard layouts are mostly not OS specific. The others are on-topic, at least as far as the computing objection is concerned.

In any case, it's best to err on the side of not closing. The risks of not closing are some speculative slippery slope, that likewise questions will be posted in the future and drown out legitimate questions. With ~1 question per day, well... The risks of closing are the very likely present frustrations of the participants.