This page will be dedicated to an introduction to alternative layouts than QWERTY, but I don’t really have much to say on them yet because I didn’t have time to practice with alternative layouts yet. That’s kind of a lie actually, I have a lot to say about them, but I’ll hold off until I’ve actually determined whether I agree with the sentiment online instead of being an echo chamber for the typical reasons.
Either way, if you’re here, you should really check out this keyboard-layouts-doc. This is a fairly comprehensive Google Document that contains statistics for many layouts as well as explanations on why you should care about the metrics and what they mean. Be careful though, many of the layouts you will find are created with onlu English text in mind. If you are writing in another language you should consider whether or not you want to use that same layout for a language where letter distribution may be entirely different. Or perhaps you want to keep using QWERTY for that, it’s also a possiblity. (Albeit a discouraged one because it’s difficult to retain your typing speed on two layouts on the same keyboard.)
One thing that a new layout may be useful for, is learning to touch type. Using a non-standard layer means you cannot refer back to the labels on your keys, because the labels do not match with what you’re typing. Assuming you’re not swapping the labels, of course, and I’d discourage this. I wasn’t able to touch type for a long time, but I forced myself to practice a few times each day and because I have been typing for so long I actually had most of the necessary muscle memory already. It was just a question of learning the feel of how far you move your fingers for each key and voila. Although I’m still not able to type numbers without looking, I love being able to look away from my screen and thinking about what I’m writing instead of having to think about how I should be typing what I’m thinking. (Can you follow? I’d say I recognise the feeling, but that’s because I’m the one who wrote this.)