That's not really fair, though. Linux users still overwhelmingly use X windows. There is no standard IME for X. This is just a historical issue. X Windows is OLD -- far older that Windows or Mac (even the old Mac), for instance.
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.
Old really means there's been more time to identify and solve the problem, and the fact it hasn't been cleanly solved is a lot more indicative of priorities than time or tech.
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.
Insisting that there can only be one input type for the entire session rather than one per window. If you are using multiple languages which each require an IME, Gnome's interpretation is completely broken. I had to stop using IBus because of it. It is possible they have changed their mind since then (several years back), but I haven't followed it. Incidentally, it was also the thing that meant I had to stop using Gnome. Before that I was a happy Gnome Shell user :-(
Pretty much. The W window system for the V distributed system predates the Macintosh (as does the Apple Lisa/1983), and W was ported to Unix in 1983. Their immediate successors - X and the Macintosh - came out in 1984, and Windows 1.0 in 1985.
Windows 1.0 was fairly primitive, but Windows 2.0 supported overlapping windows (!) in 1987, coincidentally the year that X11 was released.
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.