There are well over a decade's worth of mutually incompatible instructions for setting up basic pinyin input on previous versions of Ubuntu. People make lots of claims about needing to do now obsolete rubbish, which means that many people (including me) end up spending many hours only to end up with a broken install.
Is there a simple procedure to set up Chinese pinyin input for simplified characters that doesn't require many hours of trial and error and leave the system half broken?