My biggest problem with IMEs in free software land is that we've had groups like Gnome lean on IME developers and push through their vision of how it should work -- even though the people pushing their vision don't use IMEs. I ended up migrating to FCITX just because it was the last hold out not to cave to pressure.

Microsoft and Apple have the incentive of selling to billion-user markets. The open source community, on average, appears to have demonstrated a lack of interest in opening up the user-base further (and expecting that user-base to just roll their own solution creates multiple catch-22 and tragedy of the commons problems).

Why one of the commercial open-source vendors hasn't taken this on as a core challenge, I do not know.

Technically true, but for practical purposes IBus is the standard. That's what Fedora and Ubuntu use out of the box. Firefox beta telemetry shows about 89% IBus vs. 11% FCITX.

> My biggest problem with IMEs in free software land is that we've had groups like Gnome lean on IME developers and push through their vision of how it should work -- even though the people pushing their vision don't use IMEs. I ended up migrating to FCITX just because it was the last hold out not to cave to pressure.

What wrong thing did the Gnome folks push for?

Some things evolved, some things didn't. O hi X Windows!

They are all very nearly the same age.

Windows 1.0 was fairly primitive, but Windows 2.0 supported overlapping windows (!) in 1987, coincidentally the year that X11 was released.

It's completely fair. Most of the developer community just doesn't care.

Does Windows really?

> while most open source OSes' community (which communication revolves around English) decided that IMEs are an add-on for CJK people.

IIRC, Fedora ships an iOS/Android like Latin-script IME with autocomplete. It's not mandatory, though.

> It's a pity, and this one reason is enough for Linux to be never adopted for ordinary users in the non-western world.

The Korean situation doesn't really generalize. Among CJK, AFAICT, the Korean IBus IME on Ubuntu 18.04 is pretty broken but the Japanese IME and the various Chinese IMEs appear to be at least OK. (It's a rather surprising situation considering that the Hangul part of a Korean IME should be much simpler than the Japanese and Chinese IMEs.)

Yes, the signs that even English is passing through Windows' IME infrastructure in Windows 10 is pretty minimal by default (in Desktop mode, Tablet mode immediately turns on a couple more), but at this point Windows 10 makes almost all of it opt-in. Some of it is referred to as accessibility tools from an English perspective, because IMEs are also useful for accessibility.

The "big one" IME for most English users is the Emoji Keyboard accessible with Win+. or Win+; (whichever you prefer). It's really interesting how well emoji have helped Latin script users with further understanding the complexities of Unicode, fixing old ugly bugs in Unicode handling, and even introducing some such users to an IME that they want to use (sometimes every day).

Under Settings > Devices > Typing > Hardware Keyboard you can turn on the IME "Show text suggestions as I type" even on a hardware keyboard in Windows 10, which gives you mobile-style auto-suggestions (you can also turn on mobile-style autocorrect even on a hardware keyboard).

No, API-wise the on-screen keyboard generates keystrokes for emoji (astral keystokes, multiple keystokes for multi-scalar-value emoji) even to an IME-aware app. In contrast, the emoji picker built into the Windows 10 Pinyin IME enters emoji via IME API.

> Under Settings > Devices > Typing > Hardware Keyboard you can turn on the IME "Show text suggestions as I type" even on a hardware keyboard in Windows 10, which gives you mobile-style auto-suggestions (you can also turn on mobile-style autocorrect even on a hardware keyboard).

Thanks!

That said, even if it isn't using the IME APIs directly in most cases, it's still useful as a teaching tool/analogy tool/example tool to English speakers of what an IME can be like to use, even if a nice-to-have for an English writer versus a necessary required tool for other languages.

Windows (10 at least) has native support for these IMEs; setting it up on Windows was much easier than on Linux (which doesn't even have a standard IME). Windows also comes with basic CJK fonts, which different distros may or may not have. On Debian I have to install noto-cjk or Adobe's source han fonts.

I originally tried fcitx but had to switch to ibus. Definitely not a great experience.

In my experience, Debian is worse than Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. Fedora is better than Windows 10 when it comes to IMEs: Fedora installs the IMEs by default. Ubuntu, like Windows 10, installs IMEs when you request the addition of an IME-requiring language. OpenSUSE gives you an IME for the language you use at install time if you install openSUSE using an IME-requiring language.

I haven't tried Debian 10, but when I installed Debian 9 _in Japanese_ with a _Japanese keyboard layout_ chosen, the installer didn't bother to set up a Japanese IME!

Fedora comes with an OK set of Noto CJK fonts by default. Ubuntu comes with a minimal set of Noto CJK fonts by default, but when enabling Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, Ubuntu drops more language-appropriate fonts on the system, like Windows 10.