Deepin 20 Beta: Desktop + Apps ..Super Extended Preview!!

So, on this video I’ll go through some features of Deepin but without any particular order. It will be like a live streaming of events! And I will start with the Calendar and the click policy that plays a key role in the usability of this system. Basically it makes it unusable. So, left click does nothing than highlighting the boxes. Right click will open the menu, “New event” in this case. Double click will open the new event. Two main choices here. Work and Life. We only get a description to add, but life is okay! Save, and back to clicks! With mouse over we get a tooltip of the event.

00:59 - We can’t really read it with these graphics but anyway. With single click the event just flashes. With right click we access the menu, “Edit” or “Delete”. With double click we bring the a popover asking us for editing or deleting it. Close this from x, and on top we have the Calendar views. Aside month, we have year, week, and day. I missed to demo that, but months are represented as numbers and not names. Four for April.

01:30 - Then on headerbar there is a search, and the results will open on a right sidebar. Meanwhile I’m not sure if we can somehow sync with Google Calendar, but I don’t see any obvious way. One last thing here, is that on panel’s datetime we can’t open a calendar widget or something. Because I want to cover lots of different stuff, I can’t go through all details and features, but hopefully it would be enough to get you the main idea. As always, the best way to find about Deepin or anything else, it is by using it your selves! Okay, lets go to the main panel! So, the first thing you see here is that it gets the colors of the background and adds some blur behind it.

02:10 - If we place the mouse on edges we can resize it, which is a nice little feature. Okay, lets navigate to the items here. From left to right, first we have the menu, kinda typical. Second is the show desktop button, and the third button activates the overview, and I’ll come back to that later. Next is the taskbar with the running applications and our favorites. On the far right we have the indicators, and we can hide them if we want.

02:38 - From here the most interesting icon is probably the bell, that slides the notifications panel. A special mention to power button, that is a single button that brings all the actions. That is a common sense design, but in GNOME they’re still trying to figured it out! Oh, and from this screen we also have an option to launch the System Monitor. We are not done yet, so with right click we have some options. We have the plugins, that we can hide a few items from the panel. Then we have the status, that we can configure bar’s visibility. Next is the location option, and for example we can place the bar on the left. But not interested, so I’m gonna bring it back. And last is the “Fashion” mode, that is actually the default mode. It is a floating panel, and these broken visuals are from the NVIDIA.

03:30 - You may now thinking that’s one nice panel, but not exactly! For start we don’t have quick launchers. Instead, Super and number will move us between the workspaces. For example, Super + 4 will bring workspace 4. The other thing is that if we open an application, and then we want to open a new window, we can’t do with Control or Shift and click. Instead we need to right click and go through the menu. One of the most annoying things in every Deepin release. However hovering on icons isn’t bad, apart the fact we can’t really read the window title. While there isn’t application isolation option on panel, the Alt-Tab will only display windows from the current workspace. And I don’t want to go on bugs, but there are bugs even on that! You should have noticed the large fonts of Deepin already, that most often they don’t even fit on labels space. The default size is 14, but a better size would be 12.

04:29 - The problem is that all the rest elements are so huge, that make this font size looking ridiculous! There are no words to describe how awful the typography is, but I’m gonna keep 14 for now, which is the default and also makes easier to read on a video. Meanwhile if we try to change fonts we get this selection from 1980, and has nothing to do with GNOME fonts filtering. My point? All work in Deepin is been on surface. Going a bit deeper and everything is amateur development. You see? A desktop is as good as the Calculator app is.

05:10 - And on Deepin Calculator we only have a single view, nothing more! But at least we have history! The About dialogue is not attached to the parent window, perhaps in order to admire the blur! Oh, and these icons on the left you see in every Deepin app? Are actually fake. But they serve as a drag and drop point. And by the way, I don’t see any modifier to drag the window from anywhere. Speaking of the dialogue blur before, let me show you something. If we open this menu, behind we will see it gets a subtle yellow color. So it gets the blur from the wallpaper rather the actual background. Lets press super key and that will open the menu. So, here are our applications, and with right click we can open this menu, that the most interesting option is the uninstall directly from menu. Then we have an option to navigate inside categories if we want. On the right side we have our avatar, the pinned, the clock, the Settings and the Power. Another feature is the full screen menu. For now it is a single page, but on some teaser video Deepin guys had add paging, so that may change at some point.

06:24 - Anyway, for now we don’t have app-Folders but we can re-order our apps that is most useful. Another option is that we can switch to categories view. But you know something? The actual look and feel is pretty bad really. Nothing close to GNOME Shell UX. And then all the small stupid issues, and I will switch to a black wallpaper to show you better. So I hit Super, I start typing to search, and then I use arrows to make a selection. But we can’t see the selection because it is dark on dark. Let me switch back, and repeat. And now it will work. And that was a visual stupid issue, but sometimes stupidity extends on sound too. Deepin sound effects are so strong, that the first time I booted I got scared! So you better close those, and I’m not sure if Deepin remembers the last volume value when we reboot. But stupidity has no ends, and it continues on actual features. Look what I mean. On Deepin Files sidebar we see our disks and partitions, and most of them are created from Deepin’s default installer.

07:33 - Which by the way I’m not going to cover on this video. Now, why someone wants to see their boot partition on the Files sidebar, only the goddess of Buddhism knows. However I do want to access my Fedora disk. But the rest are useless! So what we can do, is to go on Files Settings, and scroll all the way down, and check the “Hide System Disk” box. And nothing will happen, because we need to close and reopen the window.

08:03 - That’s pathetic, but there are bigger troubles than that! So now the disks are visible no more, but now there is neither an obvious way to navigate to my Fedora disk anymore! oh, and did you notice how nicely Deepin Files ignored the last opened window size? Okay, this is a part I want to talk a lot about, and I mean Deepin overview, but I will try to keep it as short as possible. First of, and as for yesterday, and I’m not going to check every single day, Deepin 20 Git repositories are not public available. The source code is available on distro repos, but not on Github or any other service. I guess they’re working on that, but Deepin isn’t open source right now, and the thing is I can’t check what they’re doing. To give some basic context, Deepin initially was using Mutter window manager, and the multitasking overview was very similar to elementary, and it was cool.

09:08 - Then they switched to KWin, and the multitasking overview was similar to Plasma, with the virtual desktops grid. And it was awful! On this release Deepin still uses KWin, but they are porting the interface to the Mutter implementation. Since I can’t see the commits I’m not sure what’s really happening, but the point is that everything is currently super broken and super slow. NVIDIA drivers make things even worse, but even without it is not really an improvement. And while Deepin Linux is on beta 20, the actual desktop is supposed to be final release.

09:41 - At least in UOS, which is the commercial version of Deepin. Anyway, I’m going to show you how it works, but I’m warning you it is going to be ugly, and in fact I was very unsure if I should make such extended review before they fix that. But I did it, so here it comes! Okay, lets go! Super and S to open the multitasking overview. So now on the top we see our virtual desktops, and these windows thumbnails render black because of the NVIDIA. However the slow speeds you will see later isn’t NVIDIA’s fault.

10:14 - The first thing we can do, is to move a window to another workspace. If we close that workspace the windows inside will move to the desktop before, and now we get a plus icon. That means we can only have 4 workspaces, which makes it hard even for working on this very video, and I hope they will allow more later. If we add a new workspace, we will immediately get transferred to that, and also notice we get a different wallpaper too. Let me quickly show you the wallpaper mechanics. First I will bring this window here.

10:46 - Now we can pick an image we want, and set it as wallpaper from the context menu. When we add a wallpaper like that, Deepin will also store it to the registry. So next we can right click on background and select the “Wallpaper and Screensaver” option. That will hide all the windows from the desktop and it will open the wallpapers stripe on bottom. From there we can pick a wallpaper both for the desktop or the lockscreen, or remove the images we don’t want. It is a very smart design really.

11:15 - Another thing we can do, is to re-order our workspaces. And that’s something I really really want to see in GNOME Shell too. I just hope it will play better, because as you see there are some small issues in Deepin! But eventually I will manage! See? I told you so! And one more time! And I promise you, that’s not NVIDIA’s fault either! Anyway, one final thing here. On Settings there is an option that is called “Window Effect”. That basically disables the KWin compositor. I think.

11:52 - If we switch it off, apart we lose the blur everywhere, like on panel and menu, it also completely disables the multitasking overview. But we still can navigate through the workspaces even if we can’t see them. Originally Deepin was based on Ubuntu LTS, then they switched to Debian unstable, and now they’re using Debian Stable, although they don’t directly use Debian official repos. But we can add them if we want. Point is, Deepin as a distro sucks big time, so when they support it on Arch Linux and when they resolve all those issues with their desktop and compositors, I will retry and reupload, because even if Deepin isn’t the best desktop around, it is an interesting project nevertheless. On previous Deepin releases, if we’re right clicking on desktop, somewhere in the end we had an option to set desktop hot corners.

12:47 - That feature is gone now, but I suspect it is going to come back. Lets make a new folder on desktop. And then lets create a new office document. And one more. First of all, look how badly the text is displayed, and I’m telling you again, typography is one of the worst issues on Deepin. Now, there is another option that is called “Auto Merge”. Auto Merge will identify the two files as Documents, and it will automatically create a special folder for them, that can be expanded.

13:21 - While on auto merge mode, we can’t reposition the icons, and moreover the option to create new files is gone. In short? What the hell! Another thing is that we can drag and drop a file on the taskbar. For example if we want to open this file on an already opened text editor. Assuming that will eventually work. Deepin’s Text Editor can’t open office documents, but I just wanted to show you the on bottom notification, that is a standard design pattern across all Deepin apps. Another standard design pattern is the shortcuts overlay help.

13:59 - It activates with Shift + Control + ? , but we should keep them pressed with both hands like idiots. Why couldn’t just stay opened and press Escape for closing it? Deepin Settings frontpage, and here are the main categories, and on the top we have the glorious search, that is a dropdown with autocompletions. If we enter inside a category, for example default applications, the app interface will change to a column based, and we will again see the same category we picked before. They just could make it like Windows 10, but instead they made it like the annoying Plasma Settings with the double columns navigation. Now, we have the application type on the left, and on the right we can choose the app we want to set.

14:44 - And it is not only this super huge space wasting, but if we press add, we get a file manager instead of an application picker. Deepin’s Terminal, and we have cute tabs on headerbars, and that app is written on GTK and Vala. We have splitters, both horizontal and vertical. We have custom commands, which is a great idea with a very good implementation too. Basically we add a command here, and we can execute it both by clicking the icon, or setting a shortcut for it. With the same mechanics as custom commands, we can also create and store server connections. We also have lots of theme choices, and notice that themes affect the whole window, which is yet another great idea on this app. On app settings we can change the transparency, and of course a few more things. And bonus? Alt+F2 will bring the drop down terminal. Which is a fully functional terminal, so we can have tabs and split screens.

15:54 - Time for tiling, and I’m telling you already it isn’t good! If we push text editor on top, the window gets maximized. But if I push it on side edges it will do nothing, and in general lots of Deepin apps can’t really be tiled for some reason. So I’m closing this. So.. hmm? Settings failed to tiled on left, but it worked on the right? Anyway! So, now if we try to resize from the center, we will see only the one window gets resized, which is far from smart. Okay, that is getting embarrassing, and believe me I tried 4 times to make that scene! On Deepin, sometimes things work, sometimes just don’t. Anyway, so we have corner tiling, but if I try to corner a terminal, it will leave all this space around.

16:45 - And actually the same will happen with half-screen tiling. No idea why! On Personalization we have the dark theme, we have the auto that depends on the day light, and the light theme. But obviously I will switch back to dark. Then we have the accent color, that changes the accent not only on applications but also on Shell too. However it is incomplete, and there’re some more issues. Transparency only affects panel and main menu really.

17:14 - For example it doesn’t change the opacity on notifications sidebar. A very nice feature that is available in every Deepin app, is that we can override the system theme. For example we can set Files using white theme here. Then, there are some icon themes to pick from, but perhaps Bloom is the best and also the default. Next is the cursor theme that we cant resize, and next the fonts that I showed you already in detail.

17:42 - There is a demo on YouTube with Deepin using an AI assistant and voice commands, but that doesn’t seem to be included on the release. But on another video I will show you GNOME Anime Intelligence Assistant! All it requires is a small Rust Server to get access on the system, and an Alexa Skill, also written on Rust. Then you can say, “babyDora Terminal” and it will open a new terminal, or, “babyDora Shutdown” and it will shutdown the PC. “babyDora” triggers the skill, and next is the actual command. I only have done those two for now, and it will only work from devices on the home network, so it is secure.

18:23 - So we may don’t have voice commands just yet, but we have voice notes! Create a new notebook, and then we can do a text note, or a voice note. We’re clicking on the microphone and the app starts recording. When done, we save, and then we can play our note. Not a bad thing to have! Meanwhile now I have a few more notifications, let me show you the grouping. So here are the App Store notifications, and on top we have the Control Center messages. And one extra thing is the additional grouping when there are more than 3. That is definitely a better UX than GNOME Calendar notifications. Deepin’s video player, and possibly the most interesting thing is the headerbar that renders over the actual video, and it looks super good! Another nice thing is are the thumbnails on progress bar. Actually? Super nice! Then we have the playlist, that the graphics are again pretty good! And of course it can play a video, but don’t ask me what backend uses, until they offer proper source code repos! Lockscreen Please? I have nothing to say here, I’m just waiting! Deepin’s Files, and that alone needs a new 20 minutes video to describe it, and I don’t even know where to begin from. Hmm? Perhaps I will start from these boxes around the files that serve two purposes.

20:21 - Their first purpose is the distraction, because if we have lots of files it becomes pretty annoying, specially with the dark theme. Their second purpose is the misdirection, and look what I mean. Assume we want to select these 3 files. If we do this thing, we wont select anything. We actually need to select the full icon space, so the boxes around is simply a diversion to confuse you. And I will stay on selections a bit more. So with a single click we make a selection.

20:50 - But a second click on a selected item will rename it, and it is certain you will accidentally do that all the time. With double click the file opens and at least that works as expected! Another thing is the story with the filenames. For example, even if I select this file, I still won’t be able to see the full filename, and it isn’t even a long one. If we open the previewer, it is again not possible to see it and the name remains trimmed. The only way is to open the quick viewer with Space, and possibly navigate with arrows to see the rest files.

21:24 - This particular problem also happens on Plasma Files, and when your file manager misses abilities like seeing a filename, it simply sucks. Lets checkout some images next, and I will close this to have a little bit more room. And now see how small everything is, all because of the terrible grid system. Certainly we can resize, but that won’t work pretty good on a directory with a mix of images files and folders. At least Deepin Files remembers the icon sizes per directory, so we can have different sizes on our images folders.

21:57 - A file-manager is a special kind of application that isolated features are irrelevant. What matters is the full workflow but I’m not going to demo workflow scenarios here and now. So I will only quickly show a few features, and I will even skip the issues, because that app really feels like an alpha version. Throughout this video and on random places I have already show some things on Files, so I’m gonna continue with the rest, and I will start with right click on Rikka, and properties. Seriously? That’s ridiculous! But honestly? Deepin graphics are so cute that everything’s forgiven! Anyway, a nice feature here is the color tags, so if I put purple on Rikka, I would be able to access her from the sidebar.

22:43 - And by the way, we can remove or add tags directly from the context menu. I will continue with Rikka, but this time I will right click her and I will go on Compress option. Here we can select archive format, but I will just leave Zip. If we open advanced, we have an encryption capability. And compress, and close this! So now if we open the zip file, and click to see Rikka, it will ask us for a password.

23:15 - And everything takes place in very pretty interfaces! We’re done with Rikka, and next I will right click a folder and I will select the share option. And checkout this animation, although the folder actually goes on shares, and nowhere near on what it shows! Yet another Deepin misdirection! Okay, done from here, and again right clicking on a folder and add to the bookmarks. It adds it on the sidebar, and from there we can rename it or remove it, obviously. What we can’t do is to move it with drag and drop. So next, selecting these three files, right click and rename.

24:01 - And that was Deepin’s multiple files renaming. Oh, and also? That was a pro-laziness description! Next, right click on a sidebar item and open on a new tab. Now we can re-arrange the tabs or detach them, and they open on a new window. That functionality was removed from Nautilus and it is so so annoying! List view, and nothing really special here, other than we only have a single size and we can’t supersize things! So I’m typing “me”, and we have type ahead selections. Another way, we open search, typing “me” again, and now Rikka will be lost somewhere in the list.

24:42 - What we can do, is to open Filters and select the current directory option. Still, on recursive search before, Rikka should have been first result since she was on parent folder. Next, from main menu we have a typical connect to server option, and inside Settings we can set a single click mouse policy if we want. But I don’t want to! There are more things I could demo but those are the basics, as basic is the drag and drop support of this app, which is very problematic. One of the nicest things on Deepin is their screen capture tool! So we open it, and now we can select an area on the screen, and move it or resize it.

25:28 - Then we have an option for taking a video or a photo, but what I really like is the drawing tools. We can select a pen size, and then we can select pen color, and start drawing over the screenshot. When we actually taking the screenshot, we also get a notification bubble from top center. So that basically works similar to GNOME Shell, and also the notification is stored on the notifications list. I’m going to open this image to show you one more thing.

25:58 - If we set fit to screen, the the headerbars will draw again over the image similar to the videos app! There are no words to describe how much I adore that! Another great tool in Deepin is the Device Manager. Oh, and by the way that’s the administrator authorization dialogue. Device Manager doesn’t do a lot, it just lists our hardware, but every desktop should had such tool! It is very very handy! System Monitor was one of the first apps that were developed exclusively for Deepin. It is one of the best apps of Deepin, and probably if not the very best, certainly the most beautiful system monitor in any Linux desktop. With right click on a running application we have all the typical options, like kill or change priority etc.

26:48 - Then we can see all the running processes of the user, or watch all the running processes of the system. But what I love the most here, is that we can also see the systemd services. And not only see them, but also enable them or disable them etc. Deepin Photos, that is actually called Albums, and the first thing you may want to do is to resize the images. So, here we have a timeline view, that we’re still waiting for it on GNOME Photos. I think? Next view is the albums view, and we can create our first album from the plus icon. Since the album is empty, we can go back and select a few images. I’m using click and Control key to select multiple. Then we can right click, and add them to the album we create before. So if we go back in albums, the photos are now there.

27:44 - With double click we can actually see the photo, and navigate to the next or previous from the stripe. And favorite some between! This app could have been quite good, but first it is missing drawing tools, and second it is very slow! Deepin Music, and there are two major issues here. The first is by coming from Lollypop, everything else will feel terrible. And second and most important, Deepin Music is terrible anyway! In fact it is so terribly awful that I’m not even going to describe it. I’m just adding it on the video to see how it looks like.

28:20 - Can you actually listen music with it? No way! Another tool that comes pre-installed on Deepin is the Log Viewer. We can filter various system logs per date or per level. Nothing really much, it is just there. Two more things that are just there, but there is nothing much to talk about is the Document Viewer and the Text Editor. Perhaps the most interesting thing on Text Editor are the tabs on the top that are designed like workspaces. Oh, and this? That’s a tab too! Ew? A Fonts manager that it can preview as you type, but most importantly we can add fonts on favorites! You can’t imagine how useful that is for me! Deepin’s App Store, and the first thing we wanna do is to login, right? But with this login form, I don’t think it will happen! Which reminds me another strange think I found.

29:17 - When I created my account on installation, Deepin didn’t let me to choose a two letters username, so I was forced to write “me” with double “e”. Just to quickly show you the account creation, we hit the plus icon, we add a user name and a password, and then on create it will ask for a username between 3 and 32 characters! Crap? Anyway, lets go back to Deepin’s app store that many people praise! So what really makes an App Store really great? Four things! First. Good recommendations! But Deepin mostly promotes specific software for Asia, so that’s not good for me! Second. It should be fast! But Deepin App Store is extremely slow to navigate! At least for me and from Europe. Third. Accounts Syncing, so it can remember every app we have downloaded or even bought in the past.

30:09 - I didn’t login, so I just hope that works. And last but most important, native apps for your system! I know that’s kinda desktop fan requirement and most people won’t care, but I was searching for Deepin community apps without much of a luck! Okay, lets do this! So, front page and on the top we have some scrolling banners. Then we have the Top-10 applications by ranking, and next it is the hot recommendations, with a link to see even more. A bit lower we will find the essential apps, and then we have some more recommendations. On the left are the categories, and lets go inside development.

30:49 - First app is Visual Studio Code, which makes no surprise really, since is the most downloaded app. Inside the app details..well? Things are a bit awful, but anyway I will install this, and note it didn’t ask for a password and I’m not sure why’s that. Anyway, now on Downloads we can see the application, and we can pause or cancel the installation. Perhaps the most interesting part is my apps that we can see what we have installed, but I can only imagine it should display apps history in case we had logged it. Another thing is that I have some Flatpaks installed but I don’t see them here, so I guess we don’t have Flatpak support.

31:28 - And last we have this very pathetic search! So you see? There isn’t anything really special on the Deepin App Store, and in fact, it is even one of their most ugly apps! Oh, and that Weather app? It is actually GNOME Weather, but I’m not going to extend on how GNOME apps work under Deepin. Maybe on another video! So that was all, and I tried to cover the full desktop plus all the Deepin native apps, but possibly I missed lots of things! Sorry! To come to a conclusion, I’m using Deepin for three days now. The first day things were pretty bad, but today it feels a little bit more comfortable to work on it. So, is Deepin better than GNOME? Not a chance! But if Deepin goes into Chinese universities and all government buildings, and if nothing dramatic happens in GNOME, obviously Deepin will be the next best Linux desktop. Call me a stupid kid that says stupid things, but I have said years ago.

32:29 - The first thing GNOME Foundation needs to do, is to go away from US. There is not hope on this country. Previously I complained because of the disks on the sidebar. Perhaps we could hide them from the options, and they would be still available on the Computer view. So, maybe that is a bug, but just remember I only say what I see, and Deepin bug trackers and community in general doesn’t make it easy to follow the project! .