This has had huge repercussions in the computing community because of the amount of software that required frequent use of the ControlKey. Suddenly, the distance grew by a comparatively large amount.
In addition, the position is no longer on the home row. It is on the same row as the space bar.
Using TextEditors such as the EmacsFamily has been made more difficult than necessary by this addition.
Frankly, the CapsLock just isn't used that much but it occupies valuable realestate on the keyboard.
This has caused a HolyWar?.
Fortunately, on most systems this is fixable at the system or user-account level by swapping the keycodes for capslock and left-control.
WordStar, as of WS5, was sold along with switch.com, a TSR which intercepted the keycodes for the two disputed keys and swapped them.
In Linux, there are multiple ways of doing this. The simplest fix on your own Debian-based system is editing /etc/default/keyboard to read XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:swapcaps"; that will swap the keys for all users of the console.
It's simple enough to check whether the swap is implemented on a given keyboard: just hit the Control key twice while watching to see if the caps-lock LED goes on and off.
crb3 26sep16