Deepin 20: the new App Grid

Do you remember that official teaser, Deepin guys had posted some moths ago with the new application grid? I mean this teaser! And I have to admit, that video brought high expectations and super hype! But in reality? So! In case you aren’t familiar with the Deepin desktop, here we have the apps menu, and I think that’s the default style! Then we have this arrow, that can turn the menu to a full screen, and probably that’s the style most people are going to use! Basically whats new from Deepin 15 to Deepin 20, is when we select the categories view, we get this redesigned paging! And from that screen we can again restore back to the classic mode if we want to. Deepin allowing such live editing of elements is something I do like. That also means it carries a more desktop oriented design than GNOME that makes heavy use of inside preferences for almost everything. Also to mention, all these changes are already available to Deepin 20 stable release, so there is nothing super updated from master in this video! Okay, So! Lets go forward with a very quick review, and I will go as fast as I can, because I promise you I could have extended a lot if I wanted! So we open the menu and we’re starting with the default mode. Here we have all the applications and we have some sort of paging, that we can navigate with the mouse wheel.

01:40 - We can also navigate with mouse gestures, but the experience is super awful and that will get very annoying as you will see later! On the bottom of this screen we also have the pages dots that are clickable, and it’s an additional way to navigate. But if we misclick just a few pixels away, we’ll accidentally close the whole menu! Kinda details maybe, but it’s a thing that really shows the low quality of the overall design. Speaking of dots, we see some blue of those next to some applications. I’ve noticed them for ages and still I have not a clue what they’re supposed to mean! So if anyone knows, please leave a comment! Anyway! Before we proceed to the big issues, a last thing is that we obviously have an action menu on applications we can open with right click, but not with a long press. In fact? Long press acts like a single click.

02:30 - Okay, lets move on to the basics and to the serious issues with this menu! For start, we can re-arrange the icons with drag and drop! At least sometimes, because the procedure is very rough. But most importantly we can’t create app folders, and not to mention this isn’t a proper paging either. But what’s really insane with this grid is the awful performance of the animations. And I’m aware that’s partially happening because of my NVIDIA, but it is exclusively an issue in Deepin source code, rather NVIDIA’s fault. In any case what you see is what I get, and I can’t really cry tears of happiness for this experience! One more thing is what’s happening with the search.

03:10 - For example, and I have used the same example also on Deepin 15, if we search for Settings, instead of getting Deepin Settings as first result, we even get the “Blackmagic RAW Speed Test” before! I’m not sure how Deepin sorts the results, but even if I move Settings icon on the very top of the first page, it won’t work. Okay, and now the whole universe got bugged. And I could just retake the screencast, but seriously I’m leaving this on purpose so you will know. It’s not only some design misses here and there, but this desktop Shell has lots of actual bugs on current features! And it doesn’t matter if you are Apple or Deepin or Danny Trejo. You simply can’t release like that and expecting people taking you seriously.

03:53 - And after 4 minutes, it’s finally the time to cover the original topic of this video! But there isn’t really much to cover! You see? Initially from that teaser YouTube I thought that Deepin created custom application pages. But it was just a redesign of the existing categories mechanism. And I’m not sure why they’re even trying. I mean, if you want to make sure you won’t find something, just add it to a predefined category! Anyway! Since I started it let me finish it! So we press Super Key and we go to categories view. And by the way Deepin will remember the last opened mode for the next time. The first thing we see is a very nice visual design, which is the main selling point of Deepin really.

04:35 - Interaction design and performance? Piouf! Who cares? Actual distro? Worse than Ubuntu! Documentation and Community Support? If you speak Chinese, just maybe! Anyway! To the very obvious issues. First of, as you can see the icons aren’t sorted in some alphabetical order, and we can’t re-arrange them either. Second and equally awful, is while inside the category box we have multiple pages, the mouse wheel will scroll across the categories instead. So if we want to navigate inside the boxes we need to use the bugged gesture! And on an additional note, while the main categories can endlessly scroll, inside the boxes we have boundaries so we can’t rotate. Just a small inconsistency. oh! And we can also use the dots buttons! That will again escape the whole menu if we slightly misclick.

05:25 - There isn’t much really to say, but one last thing is that categories are obviously dynamic created. So when I installed Minecraft, the Games category also created. And if you’re wondering, the search is exact the same as before! As a final comment I’d say that all this is completely useless, but if Deepin adds the ability to customize the categories and move the icons between directly from the Shell, I’d say it would be a really nice design. Okay, that perhaps was a very negative review, but if you’re new to this channel you should know that at the moment I only care for 4 desktops, GNOME, Plasma, elementary and Deepin. And in fact, I currently have higher expectations from Deepin than the rest three.

06:08 - So don’t confuse my reviews with hate! What I don’t like, I’m not really bothering with!.