Deepin 15.9
Mayank Sharma is glad he didn’t heed the advice of his peers who told him to avoid the gremlin-like cuteness of this distro.
Mayank Sharma is glad he didn’t heed the advice of his peers who asked him to avoid the gremlin-like cuteness of this distro – and found a polished desktop experience.
Form and function usually have an inverse relation when it comes to software. This is perhaps why mainstream feature-rich desktop environments à la Gnome and KDE work on improving the usability of their environments. On the other hand, aesthetically pleasing desktops strive to be a functional match to their well-established counterparts. You only need to spend a few hours with Deepin to realise that the desktop, and indeed the entire distro, is not only pleasing to the eye but doesn’t lack any of the critical functions you’d expect from an everyday desktop.
Unlike most distros these days, the main Deepin release is available as an install-only ISO. The project does have a Live system image, but it’s best avoided as it includes rather dated versions of Deepin’s custom apps and it doesn’t do justice to the current release. The distro has also dropped support for 32-bit machines. Like most things Deepin, the distro uses a home-brewed installer, which is fairly easy to navigate but doesn’t offer a partitioner, so you’ll have to prepare the partitions for installing Deepin using other means. Deepin’s 2.4GB ISO requires at least 16GB of disk space for installation.
Deepin uses a first-boot configurator app to help you tweak the look and feel of your installation by changing icons, enabling window effects and more. On lower-end machines, you can run the installation in Efficient mode to make the best use of the limited resources, while on newer ones you can use the Fashion mode to turn up the bling. Both layouts have a dock at the bottom, but use different application launchers. By default, the Fashion mode uses a full-screen launcher that lists all the installed apps, but can be made to divide the apps into categories. Or you can use the more traditionallooking app launcher, the default in Efficient mode.
The marquee feature in this 15.9 release is the distro’s support for touch-screen gestures, which opens it up to more devices. The release notes also highlight the expanded power management options, which now enable you to set different delays before the various power management functions kick in. There are several other minor improvements and bug fixes that improve the overall functionality and usability of the distro. For instance, you can now easily alter the GRUB background image by simply dragging one into the appropriate settings section.
Deepin’s Settings section deserves a special mention. In a departure from the norm, all of Deepin’s tweakable parameters are accessible via a hidden panel that folds into the desktop itself. Apart from its appearance, it’s a pretty standard settings panel that you can use to track and install updates and configure various aspects of your installation.
The other custom Deepin app that deserves a special mention is the App Store. Not only does it look inviting, it can install multiple apps at the same time. Listed besides the usual categories of apps is the Uninstall section that can help you get rid of any installed apps using a more familiar parlance. There’s a Deepin custom app for conducting the majority of common desktop tasks, such as watching films, listening to music, viewing images, taking backups, recording screencasts, and about a dozen more. These are complemented by mainstream productivity apps like Google Chrome and
Thunderbird, and the proprietary WPS Office suite.
All in all, and considering the amount of data we give away to various social media services, we wouldn’t let the spying accusations prevent us from enjoying this distro.