Comment # 2 on bug 1134688 from Rainer Hantsch

Well, imagine the following:

You have servers with many TBytes of data. Everything iso-8859-1 based.
And you use over years symlinks to several points in this data structure,
everything is fine.

Then you get "forced" to use a new Leap 15 because new software is not working
on openSuSE 13.2 any more.

You install a new OS and re-use the /home path to not loose all desktop
settings, and voila, a problem here, a problem there, ... 
Finally you end up with creating symlinks from important folders with German
Umlauts in their name -> names with translated Umlauts (� -> Ue), only to get
it somehow working again.

-> NOT CRITICAL?   - I see it different, it stops me from productively working


About "norm"...
You should view it from this point:  KDE/Plasma is literally a GUEST on the
underlaying OS. It is a huge program collection, running on the OS, means, I
can use the OS also without KDE/Plasma.
And this OS _perfectly_ supports many different encodings, one of them is
iso-8859-1.
So the logical consequence is:   Declaring UFT8 as "norm" is a bit keen. In
best case I will accept that it is _ANOTHER_ encoding in the long line of
others.
So it also has to be able to fully support other encodings, too.

It is ok, if it internally only works with UTF8. But it definitely has to
support any encoding of the underlaying OS, when it accesses something there.