Japanese Input With Pop OS 21.04

The 21.04 release of Pop OS is pretty great except for one issue I had. Figuring out how to get Japanese input working properly was kind of an ordeal.

I wanted to be able to switch easily between Japanese and English and after lots of searching through Google I ended up finding the solution. Well it wasn't Google that found me the fix actually. I didn't solve my problem until I searched Japanese in the GitHub repository for Pop OS. That led me to an issue very similar to mine. The solution was to delete the file /etc/profile.d/pop-im-ibus.sh and then reboot. After that I could go into Setting -> Language and Region -> Manage Installed Languages then switch the Keyboard Input method system from IBus to fcitx. It was easy to get Mozc working with the fcitx Config Tool once fcitx was available.

It did turn out to be a weird bug specific to Pop OS which explains why I had to search so hard. Hopefully it will be fixed properly in an update or at least with the 21.10 release. Loving Pop OS 21.04 otherwise! It seems like this bug was introduced in an update to the 20.10 release.

I guess I am wondering why switching from IBus to fcitx is necessary to get a not that obscure (to me at least!) feature working. Though probably figuring that out is above my pay grade.

Hope this post made sense / was useful to somebody!


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