alt Hacker News> I’m too afraid to use non-ASCII in filenames much.
I suggest installing a fresh Linux distribution with e.g. bg_BG.UTF-8 locale and playing with it, especially with XDG directories like "Плот", "Свалени" and "Документи", and apps that should use them by default. Everything should Just Work™.
Although I admit that when reporting bugs for apps that can't handle non-ASCII paths, the responses from the developers (unless they're themselves from non-English speaking countries, but sometimes even then) quite often seem to be very thinly veiled "I can't be bothered to figure out where I botch things, why can't you just speak English like all reasonable people".
To be fair, as far as unicode goes, cryllic is kind of the easy case (no combining characters, no rtl, etc). In some ways its even easier than (non-english) latin scripts because in latin you can get easily confused with windows-1252 where things sort of work where if you are accidentally using a legacy 8bit encoding with cryllic you are more likely to figure that out quickly.