I want to know what keyboard layout is most popular in Russia. There are many choices.
Typewriter:
Phonetic:
Windows:
As the US has qwerty(mainstream), dvorak, and colemak (non-mainstream, but supposedly better), I want to know more about keyboard layouts in Russia beyond what Wikipedia has to say. Is there a right choice?
The answer is quite short: the layout, which you’ve called ‘Windows’ (because it has ‘Win keys’, I guess, since the rest of layout is a bit older than MS Windows®) is a default and most popular for at least twenty years.
There is no any alternative letter layout for Russian, like Dvorak for English, because ЙЦУКЕН (ЙІУКЕН at that time) was initially developed on the same basis as Dvorak was.
But sorts of variation in disposition of punctuation and additional chars are possible. For example, among typographers Birman’s layout is quite popular:
It’s available in KDE and GNOME out of a box and as installable library (proprietary, if it makes any difference) for OS X and MS Windows.
As for ‘phonetic’ layouts, there are several of them. What your’ve posted here is a reverse-ДВК (ДВК computers had regular ЙЦУКЕН-Cyrillic and phonetic JCUKEN-Latin), and I doubt that it is more popular than ЯШЕРТЫ nowadays. Anyway, all of them are used only by people who are not able to touch-type when they eventually get a keyboard without Cyrillic legend.
From personal experience, the third one (Windows) is the only you are likely to see. Of course, on-screen keyboards have their peculiarities (iPad's, for instance, does not have top row with Ё).
Typewriters do use typewriter layout, though. At least, mine has.
