Linux distributions and Python 2

In python3 you can't really rely on ranges or indexes on strings either, because you never know if you will be splitting a unicode grapheme cluster and creating something broken.

But, it works most of the time… it will just fail when unexpected unicode sequences appear (combining accents, or emoji skin tone modifiers, or flags, or ...)

Contrast this with perl6, which has built in support for correctly preserving grapheme clusters in it's string methods.