[blowski]

Is it not common in Russia then?

I had a Russian housemate in London who exclusively used an English keyboard because he liked that model and it wasn't available in Cyrillic. He gave me the impression that a lot of people in Russia used English keyboards. But then he was an English-speaking programmer, and not representative of the "average Russian".

[permo-w]

The impression i get is that you can write Russian in Roman text, and most Russians will understand you, but if you write English with Russian characters, very few people will understand you