I’m a Linux noob, so apologies if there is an obvious answer to this question.
I’m trying to install Japanese language IME to Bazzite. So far I have Fcitx 5 installed, with Mozc for Fcitx 5 from Discover.
Fcitx shows up on the taskbar, and the menus work. I can add Japanese input to the list, but so far I can’t get Japanese input to actually work. It shows up as JP on the taskbar, but no clear way to change to hiragana/katakana/kanji.
Hi there! I haven’t tried this on my Steam Machine I built with Bazzite in mind yet, but I’ll see if I can help out here as I type in Japanese to my best friend occasionally.
If you hit the super/windows key on your keyboard and go to keyboard shortcuts, is there a shortcut set for specifically switching between Japanese mozc and English?
Thanks for the reply.
Do you mean on the Keyboard > Shortcuts section of the System Settings menu?
I haven’t got a shortcut set there. But I do have one set up in Fcitx that shows switching between JP and EN, but when I type, there’s no Japanese output.
I did a quick search on the Bazzite github and found this issue. A comment suggested that you may have to set Fcitx5 to autostart (I believe you can refer to the Fcitx5 documentation on this).
It’s been about 2 years since I last used Fcitx5, so I don’t remember much, but could it be that you have to switch between character modes first? For example, I’m using ibus with Anthy and while I can switch using the system tray menu, I can also do it using my preferred shortcut of Ctrl+\. That is also the case with ibus with Mozc. Plus, Mozc assigns character-switching to the special JIS keys that don’t exist in US-ANSI keyboards (Eisu, Muhenkan, Henkan, Kana…), which is potentially why it’s not working for you.
Thanks for that.
That does seem to be the problem, I have no way to switch character modes. The shortcuts I have found online don’t seem to work, I’m not sure what the correct mozc shortcuts are supposed to be.
So, I switched to Ibus and Anthy, and it worked instantly. So I guess I’ll just use that. Not sure why I didn’t just try that in the first place…
Thank you again for pointing me in the right direction.
The problem with Ibus is that input switching doesn’t work under Electron apps and Chromium browsers running native Wayland (yet, IIRC it might change in the fairly near future but who knows), so you can only type using the Latin alphabet despite having the input mode set to Kana. To me it doesn’t really matter because I mainly use Firefox and can copy-paste non-Latin into Discord, for example, but it might be a major inconvenience for you. This is where Fcitx5 is advantageous, as it actually works with Electron/Chromium on native Wayland:
For the shortcuts, well, you’ll have to look for Mozc settings first, then configure the IME shortcuts yourself. This is how it looks like when accessed from GNOME Settings → Keyboard → Japanese (Mozc) → Preferences:
I ended up mapping the special keys as layers for Home/End/PgDn/PgUp on my keyboard to not mess so much with the default Mozc keys, but it’s still way less convenient than Anthy that has the on_off and circle_kana_mode, which is why I prefer Anthy to Mozc (still have it installed for testing purposes).
At the end of the day the choice of Ibus+Anthy or Fcitx5+Mozc depends if you value convenience or need to type Japanese in Wayland Electron/Chromium. Plus I’m pretty sure fcitx5-anthy is a thing on Fedora repos, so if you want full Wayland compatibility and convenience you might want to try layering it and see how it works (only if it’s not already installed by default, of course).
