A Shallow Experience with the Homegrown Linux Distro Deepin

Introduction

Yesterday I reinstalled the system twice, so I didn't have time to write a post. I just finished setting things up today, so here it is. These past few days, after upgrading my computer's hardware, I still hadn't finished configuring the system—I'd only installed Win10. I still prefer working in a Linux environment, and I saw that Deepin's UI looks really nice, so I installed it to give it a try. But I haven't used it for long, so this can only be a shallow experience.

System Screenshots

The desktop in two modes. Fashion Mode (similar to the Mac)

Efficient Mode (similar to Windows)

Dashboard (all applications)

Grouped view

Multitasking view

Control Panel

App Store

The Review Begins

This article mainly covers: user interface, applications, development experience, and system performance details Each section gets a score out of 10.

User Interface

Score: 9.0 (docking one point so you don't get cocky)

You can tell from the screenshots above that Deepin's UI is genuinely top-notch. The actual experience is really satisfying—not a lot of flashy effects, a clean interface that still has personality (perfect for showing off XDD...) Deepin's desktop environment is called DDE. Unlike other "homegrown distros" that just slap a new theme on Gnome or KDE and claim they made it themselves, this DDE was built from scratch with Qt. Deepin's desktop used to be developed in HTML5, so it was rather laggy; this Qt-rewritten desktop hasn't stuttered at all during use.

Applications

Score: 8.5 (no pressure for daily use; no need to switch back to Windows)

What matters most for an OS is the quantity and quality of apps. The reason Windows became the king of desktop operating systems is its huge software ecosystem; the fundamental reason Windows Phone declined was also a lack of enough apps. As a developer, I don't really care about promoting Linux on the desktop. I use Linux purely because it's convenient for development. On Linux, anything you can do with a mouse, you can definitely do from the command line—the reverse is not true. One of the screenshots above is Deepin's App Store, and the QQ icon is right there in plain sight. In fact, Deepin already comes with QQ preinstalled. For a long time, running QQ on Linux has been a big problem, because Tencent officially won't release any more QQ clients, so you either use WebQQ or mess around with WineQQ yourself—very troublesome and unstable. Deepin configures it for you: it works out of the box and is stable enough. As for Windows software, Deepin purchased a Crossover license and preconfigured commonly used Windows apps (such as WeChat, PS, Xunlei, Baidu Cloud, and iQiyi) so you can install them directly from the App Store. Very convenient. Although the App Store is convenient, as a programmer I still spend most of my time on the command line. I found Deepin's apt package manager a bit confusing, because when I ran apt update and it found new packages available, using apt upgrade to update them told me that updating via apt would cause errors, and that I should choose 系统更新 in the Control Panel... Turns out system updates can't be done directly via apt on the command line—you have to do it in the Control Panel = =. A bit of a hassle.

Development Experience

Score: 8.0

On installing development tools: Very convenient—they're all in the App Store. vscode, sublime, the whole JetBrains suite, all one-click installs. (Although the JB suite also has a little tool for managing them, installing these from the store is really convenient—thumbs up for that)

Actual development experience—not much of it. I've only used it for a few days, haven't even installed Android Studio, just installed VSCode to write frontend code and PHP, plus pycharm. JetBrains stuff is really good—not only a great experience, but also cross-platform. Daily development is no problem. npm and pip both work OK. I manage Python with anaconda—no issues.

I've seen people on forums saying the versions of these tools in Deepin's repos aren't new enough. Easy fix—isn't Deepin based on Debian? Just use Debian's repos.

System Performance

Score: 6.5 (rather mediocre performance)

Deepin's pretty interface is still fairly demanding on hardware. In actual use it doesn't feel as good as Debian with Gnome or KDE. My computer is a 6th-gen i5 with 16GB of RAM, and Deepin is installed on an SSD, but it still feels a bit odd—not as comfortable as Debian.

Experience Details

Score: 3.0

First, boot. From power-on to reaching the desktop, no issues—fast, within about 15 seconds. But once on the desktop, the wallpaper won't load?? This wallpaper loading process takes about a minute. You can still operate freely during this time so it doesn't matter much—it's just that the wallpaper is a black screen, which, for someone with a mild case of OCD like me, is unbearable.

Then there's power management. Deepin's power management definitely has problems, because you can't shut down or reboot normally! Yes, you heard that right—shutdown and reboot don't work on my computer. Specifically: whether you choose shutdown from the menu or type a shutdown command in the terminal, it gets stuck on this screen. The mouse can still move, but the UI is frozen and it never actually shuts down. I had to force a power-off.

If the wallpaper loading earlier was a minor issue, this should count as a major one. This problem directly led to Deepin not lasting more than 3 days on my computer.

Networking also has big problems. After waking the computer from sleep, the WiFi disconnects, and you can't reconnect! It can't find any WiFi signals at all! Some people on the forums said a wired connection still works; on my computer it doesn't. And this isn't just my computer—a lot of people have this issue.

(There are some other minor issues I don't want to complain about anymore)

Conclusion

Finally, Deepin's overall score across the aspects mentioned above: 7 The score is still decent, because the good-looking UI and rich applications pulled up the average. I'm still fairly optimistic about Deepin as a distro—it has a lot of potential; it's just not very stable yet, and many details are unfinished. If they get power management and performance optimized, it would definitely become another major player among Linux distros. To quote an answer on Zhihu: If even Deepin can't succeed, Linux on the desktop is finished. Deepin is a system that's truly made with care. I hope it gets better and better. I'm waiting for the day I can go back to Deepin.

Wrote this much, seems pretty good. Anyway, I'm out—going to install the big lizard (OpenSUSE) (flees

Welcome to Chat with Me

• Coding livestream: https://live.bilibili.com/11883038
• WeChat official account: DealiAxy
• Zhihu: https://www.zhihu.com/people/dealiaxy
• Jianshu: https://www.jianshu.com/u/965b95853b9f