I switch between three keyboards, two western ones and Chinese Pinyin entry. I have fcitx installed to switch between Pinyin and standard entry and use the keyboard switching in MATE to switch between keyboards.
While I originally believed there was a bug in fcitx since switching between entry fields in firefox, chromium and thunderbird using the non-default keyboard always switched me back to the default keyboard, this even when hitting ENTER in a Chromium entryfield, I now believe the problem might lie in MATE or CentOS. There is no problem remembering whether a particular program is configured by me to use Pinyin input or not so that seems to work fine.
Can anyone else confirm this issue? Might it be a configuration issue on my end? By the way, I use CTRL-SHIFT+RIGHT-SHIFT to switch between keyboards.