So earlier I found out Fcitx doesn’t work under WPS on Linux. And there’s an issue about it on Jionglian’s tracker too: https://github.com/fcitx/fcitx5/issues/83 The solution everyone on the internet gives is to set: env QT4_IM_MODULE="fcitx5" and then launch WPS, after which the IME works. That did jack shit for me. And from what Jionglian has said in various places (GitHub, IRC, SNS), setting it to fcitx5 isn’t actually fixing anything — it fails to find a real “fcitx5” and falls back to xim, which is why it works. So why the hell are we setting “fcitx5” at all? Just set “xim” directly!

If you need to work with Doc files and the like that came out of Office, WPS Linux might be your only option. Yeah, “only option.” Don’t come at me with LibreOffice — if you say that, I have every reason to suspect you’ve literally never opened an Office file that was handled on Windows. WPS Linux from a few years back was actually pretty decent: fast to open, feature set was enough, good compatibility with Doc files and so on. Sure, anything with slightly complex layout still looked like shit, but at least you could open the file and read it, which is more than I can say for fucking LibreOffice. I’ve been using it the whole time. But in recent years WPS Linux has picked up the same bad habits as the Windows version, bolting on dumbass “cloud drive,” “cloud templates,” “cloud space” type features that you can’t turn off. Even better, it leaves a background process running called “Cloud Office.” Cloud-deez-nuts, more like. So I poked around a bit and found a trick for installing a “clean” WPS Linux: Install the English version, then add the Chinese localization on top. I don’t recommend just using the English version as-is, because it’s not about how good your English is — an English system is just bad at supporting Chinese typesetting.

WPS recently put out a new Linux build. Looks like it’s been ported to QT5, the UI actually looks decent now, and it supports scaling too. Great news, genuinely. But after using it for a while I ran into a problem: there’s always a wps-office process sitting in the background. Nice. So Kingsoft brought its Windows habits over to Linux too, huh?