On installing ibus and ibus-libpinyin and ensuring the appropriate environment variables were applied, I attempted to run ibus-setup. I went to the "Input Method" section and added the "Chinese - Intelligent Pinyin" method. At that point ibus-setup output this message:
dconf-WARNING **: failed to commit changes to dconf: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name ca.desrt.dconf was not provided by any .service files Restarting ibus-setup showed that the changes had not stuck (if they ever were even applied). The problem persisted until I installed dconf into my profile, at which point it worked as expected. It seems Nix has encountered this problem as well: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/11108 I believe this would be fixed by changing dconf from a regular input to a propagated-input of ibus. Note that ibus-setup needs to be run in order to add *any* input method, including, say, English. - Reepca