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.
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.
crb3 26sep16