Thread by @ManishEarth

A thing that frustrates me a bit is that my ability to type words in different (non-English) languages varies *wildly* based on precisely which computing device i'm using

on Android, I can type Hindi, Marathi (phonetically w/dictionary), Chinese via pinyin for both simplified and traditional and also via jyutping

and also a bunch of other stuff I use sometimes (Urdu, etc)

but I can't easily do eastern european diacritics for names (like ț)

on Windows I can type Hindi and Marathi phonetically with a dictionary. The pinyin Traditional input is a setting in the "Simplified" language pack so I can't do both without toggling settings.

Compose key gives me all the diacritics

(I like to use both simplified and traditional because I'm personally more comfortable with simplified, but I sometimes talk with friends who are more comfy with traditional)

On my personal Linux desktop I can only do pinyin Simplified Chinese, and it has the same settings toggle problem. No phonetic Hindi/Marathi.

Compose key gives me all the diacritics

I can't get IMEs to work on my work linux laptop, but I use Chrome on that one and Google Inputtools is great, supports phonetic Marathi and Hindi, pinyin simplified & traditional, and jyutping

Compose key gives me all the diacritics

And these are just the writing systems I use regularly, for things like cyrillic, arabic, hebrew, other indic scripts i usually end up going to a character picker or using my phone

(yes, i am not the intended primary audience)

I get why some of these restrictions exist (jyutping is not used by native speakers, most traditional users don't use pinyin, people rarely mix trad&simplified), but it's still frustrating to lose these capabilities

and IMO everything should have phonetic keyboards for indic languages, very few younger people can type using the keyboard layout. I would like to use Marathi on my linux computers please

linux IMEs not supporting some of the most spoken languages well is extremely bad