Western desktops could learn from Linux Deepin 23 (2024)

After a couple of years in development, Linux Deepin 23 arrives, with some new shiny that throws shade on the leading Western desktop distros.

Deepin 23 was finally released last week, nearly two years since we reported on the preview. Deepin is the free community sibling of Uniontech's UOS distribution, and as of last November, the company claimed it had more than three million paying users.

As we said back then, there are about ten times as many CentOS and Fedora users as there are RHEL customers – and about five times as many users of Debian-family distros as all the RHELatives put together – so if the free:paid user ratio in the People's Republic is anything like elsewhere, that implies that Deepin is one of the world's most-used desktop distros.

By default, Deepin resembles a brighter Windows 11: taskbar at the bottom, centered icons, etc. – click to enlarge

We suspect that many users in the West will be too concerned about potential Chinese government spyware hidden in the OS to run Deepin as their main OS. The company does publish a lengthy privacy policy – in English – but one might well worry that the Chinese government could overrule that if it wanted.

As such, this is more an overview than a deep dive. The dual root partitions we described in Deepin 20.5 are gone, but version 23 still sets up a moderately complex partitioning scheme, including an EFI system partition, a 1.5 GB /boot partition, a swap partition, and a 15 GB root partition, and the rest of the disk given to a partition labeled _dde_data. All are in plain old ext4 format, but there's some magic being done with the data partition that we didn't have time to trace. It appears to be mounted at multiple places, including /home, /var, /opt, and a mount point called /persistent beneath them all. We're not sure exactly how it's been done, but the distro has some kind of atomic installation facility with rollback.

As usual, it's a fantastic looking distro. The loading screen is the name Deepin in dark blue, with a wave of lighter blue liquid gradually sloshing in and filling the letters; finally, the tittle of the letter "i"pops off and bounces back into place. The desktop is colorful, with more than half a dozen choices of icon theme, some retro-styled. There are multiple color palettes, wallpapers, and the taskbar can be centered or left-aligned and placed on any screen edge. The only thing missing from previous releases is the floating dock option, which Deepin used to call "fashion" mode. Since KDE can now do this, perhaps it's too passé now.

The start menu pops up a floating box with a grid of app icons, which can be maximized into a Windows 8-style fullscreen launcher, or sorted, either alphabetically or by category. Although the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) has far fewer options to set than KDE Plasma 6, for instance, the options are all in one place, not spread over three or four "alternative" launchers. On Plasma, you have to try all the different plugins for launch menu, app switcher, desktop handler, and so on, to see which you prefer. You may even need to make notes – it's that complicated. In DDE, it's all in one place, which for us is far better execution and makes it much easier to explore. As well as multiple status icons on the taskbar, there's also a pop-out "quick settings" panel like that in GNOME or recent versions of macOS.

If any KDE developers read this, we seriously and strongly recommend that the KDE team takes a long, close look at Deepin. DDE shows both how pretty and how functional a Windows-style desktop can be, without needing Plasma's multiple overlapping options. This is what we'd hoped to see in Plasma 6, but didn't get. It's probably fair to say that Deepin is the most sophisticated implementation of a Windows-like interface on any OS these days. It's considerably more flexible and configurable than Windows 11 itself, and it makes Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, and the others look clunky and old-fashioned. Don't get us wrong; this grumpy old vulture is happier with the relatively austere and Spartan Xfce, but for those who want something that's shinierout of the box, DDE shows how it ought to be done. Even Microsoft could learn from the Chinese developers.

The installer now has a custom-installation option that can use existing partitions. We tried it on one of The Reg FOSS desk's elderly test laptops, alongside several other distros. Although it installed and tried to boot, sharing a /home partition was too much for it and it never got to the GUI. Give a whole PC over to it and we suspect it'll be fine. It also wasn't very happy in VirtualBox, with some similar display corruption to that we saw in the Qt-based Ubuntu remixes. In a QEMU-based hypervisor it ran perfectly smoothly.

There are utilities for maintenance, such as this passable imitation of the macOS Disk Utility – click to enlarge

The ISO offers a live desktop mode, so you can try it out without installing, or you can choose to boot directly into the installer, Debian or openSUSE-style. It also offers the choice of kernel 6.6 or 6.9, and there's a button in the setup program to install current Nvidia drivers.

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There are several places where this Chinese OS doesn't work quite right outside the country. The default timezone is Beijing, and although the installer offers English, it's US-only – there are no options for UK or other localizations. (You can choose one post-install, though.) We couldn't get the built-in AI assistant to work – but then again we didn't want it. It's another indicator that the pervasive trend of "everything is better with LLM bots" is worldwide now.

The Deepin app store is full of Chinese apps labeled only in Chinese, but familiar names such as Firefox and Chrome are there, along with an impressive list of others. Uniontech offers its own IDE and Linyaps packaging tools too. It seems serious about building a community and app ecosystem. The Deepin Browser is Chromium-based, but uses the elderly Chromium 93 code base, so installing a replacement browser might be prudent.

There are some amusing translations in places. We liked the estimated installation time: "It takes about a few minutes." The Linyaps tool describes apps as being isolated in "pagodas," which amused us. The introductory video is only in Chinese as well. Even so, for a distro we suspect few outside China would even consider, the localization is pretty good. On home turf, Uniontech claims impressive levels of community involvement.

It has dark mode, including automatic switching, and the Settings app includes a friendly graphical updater – click to enlarge

Over this release's protracted development period, Uniontech seems to have backed away from some of its optimistic tech claims. Although the company said it would build its own distro, there's still Debian under here. The ChromeOS-style twin root partitions have gone (although the single one left is still labeled roota). DDE's window manager is KDE's Kwin. Although some of the betas offered Wayland as an option, it's gone from the final release, which uses just X.org.

There's a lot to like here, and we feel that many of the better-known Linux vendors in the Occident could learn a lot by studying Deepin. We especially like the "Deepin Home" applet, right on the desktop, which offers communications with the company and the user community, a bug reporter, a suggestions box, a wiki, access to source code, a news page, and more. There's also a manual right next to it.

To us, it looks like the world of Linux in China is advancing rather quicker than elsewhere. Yes, it builds on well-established tech from the West – like the other big Chinese distro, openKylin, which is built on Ubuntu. But Chinese Linux companies are clearly trying new things and improving the fit and finish – and with a commendable focus on users, not on tools for servers and their administrators. You might not want to run a Chinese OS on your own PC, which is fair enough... but take a look at how the other half of the Linux world lives. Their grass really is greener, and our local vendors should be trying harder. ®