I accidentally stumbled upon this article (FAQ) while searching for good unicode fonts.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

It is the nicest article i found so far about the subject, why is UTF-8 the best approach (for Linux at least)
and how should programmers start implementing UTF-8, it also explains how UTF-8 works and gives examples
of apps that failed or succeeded in implementing Unicode as UTF-8, some of you might find it quite useful.

Razvan