It looks like there are loads of weird and strange calendars that try to improve on the Gregorian calendar. Some stick with the twelve months while others divide the year into 13! A little searching shows some interesting ones that people came up with:
- the International Fixed Calendar, a 13-month calendar made in 1902, interestingly was adopted by Kodak for quite a while! Each month has 28 days, and there is an extra "year day" appended to bring the total to 365 days. Another day is added during leap years.
- the Pax Calendar, another 13-month calendar that was made in 1930, but instead of having leap days to keep it consistent with the Gregorian calendar, it has leap weeks. That's neat I guess.
- and the Symmetry454 calendar, which is a 12-month calendar made in 2002 (so much more recent than the above two) which alternates between months with four and five weeks. Additionally, it also has leap weeks, making December a five-week month every so often.
All of the above are "perennial", meaning the weekdays don't change every year. This could be both a good thing (makes things more predictable, you could reuse calendars from any previous year) but also as a negative (some birthdays would be on weekdays while others are on weekends). The 13-month options sound nice, but it would be very tough to get people interested in remembering a 13th month. I like the Symmetry454 calendar the most out of the three, since it's elegant while retaining the usual twelve months.
You also have the calendar made during the French Revolution in tandem with stuff like metric time and other base-10 standardisation, which had 10 months per year. It was removed after Napoleon took over, however, and wasn't adopted by any other nation.
I also find changing when the year begins from the birth of Jesus (which, apparently, isn't even that spot on, the guy was born four years before 1 AD I think) to some when else to be interesting too. The Holocene calendar adds another 10,000 years to represent the beginning of humans doing agriculture and such!
As for the question bit, I would like to ask what you all think of these alternate calendars. Would you switch to them if given the opportunity? If major world powers were to switch to the calendar, how would the public react? Is it possible to configure the clock to use an alternate calendar system on Linux?
Another thing I would like to ask if we were to change the calendar and possibly add a 13th month, what would you rename the months? It would help differentiate the old Gregorian dates in old texts, videos, etc. with new reformed ones, and it would also be a bit of fun! I also really don't like that the Caesars decided to shift the year by two, making September the 9th month, October the 10th, etc. Personally, I would name them after the major moons in the Solar System (the Moon, Ganymede, Europa, Titan, Miranda, etc.) given that the months were originally based on the lunar phases.