Experiences with deepin 15



One of the last releases of 2015 we heard about was deepin 15. The deepin distribution has gone through a number of changes since the project's previous version. For example, deepin is now based on Debian's Unstable branch while older versions used Ubuntu as their base. Looking through the project's release announcement, we discover deepin has benefited from additional language translations with Malay, Bulgarian, Swedish, Croatian, Japanese, Korean, Finnish, Spanish, Hindi and Ukrainian translations being added. The new version also features a new window manager: Deepin Desktop Environment and system stability has been thoroughly optimized to become lighter and more sensitive. A new window manager has been adopted in this edition. It can intelligently detect the current computer environment, then initiates a proper window manager. The deepin distribution is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. The installation media we download is 1.8GB in size. Booting from this media brings up a menu asking if we would like to launch deepin's system installer or start a desktop environment in "failsafe" graphics mode. At least this is the menu I saw when running deepin in a VirtualBox environment and when running on my desktop computer in Legacy BIOS mode. When booting deepin's media with my desktop computer's UEFI mode enabled, deepin's boot menu only offered to run the distribution's system installer, the option to run a live desktop environment was not present. I also found deepin would not boot on my computer when run in Legacy BIOS mode, but it would boot when I tried booting with UEFI enabled.



deepin's system installer is a graphical application which can be launched from the live media's boot menu or from the distribution's live desktop environment. The system installer features a very small number of screens. On the first screen we are asked to provide a username and password in order to create an account. We are also asked to provide a hostname for our computer. There are buttons on the first screen which will bring up windows where we can change our keyboard's layout or select our time zone from a map of the world. The second screen of the installer asks onto which partition we would like to install deepin. If a suitable partition is not available, we can switch to "Expert" partitioning mode. This brings up a partition manager similar to the ones Ubuntu's installer and Calamares use. The partition manager makes it easy to see the layout of our disk and to add or remove partitions. The deepin installer supports working with Btrfs, ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS and Reiser file systems. Once we have set up our partitions, deepin's installer copies its files into place and reboots the computer so we may begin using our new operating system.



I ran into some trouble with the installer the first few times I went through it. The first time I walked through the installer, I tried to install deepin on a Btrfs volume. Early in the installation process, the system installer window disappeared and disk activity stopped, suggesting the installer had crashed. I rebooted the computer and relaunched the installer, this time taking the ext4 file system option. Again, after a few minutes, the system installer vanished and, this time, the operating system locked up, necessitating a hard reboot. The third time through, I tried using the ext4 file system again and deepin installed successfully. I'm not sure why the third attempt worked while the second attempt did not, the same settings were used in both instances.



Once deepin has been installed, the operating system boots to a graphical login screen. The background of the login screen resembles a night sky. From there we can log into the account we created at install time. Signing in brings up the Deepin Desktop Environment. The desktop features an OS X-style application launcher and task switcher at the bottom of the screen. This launcher includes a button which opens a full screen application menu. Clicking a gear icon on the launcher brings up a configuration panel on the right side of the screen and I will come back to this panel later.





deepin 15 -- Running the WPS suite and Chrome web browser

(full image size: 399kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



While deepin's desktop environment worked well on my desktop computer and was pleasantly responsive, the desktop environment was sluggish when run in a virtual machine. Enabling VirtualBox's 3-D support and installing the VirtualBox guest add-ons helped to make Deepin Desktop Environment more responsive, but the desktop never offered the performance I would expect from MATE or Plasma. In either environment, deepin required about 340MB of memory when logged into the desktop.



Looking through deepin's full screen application menu that displays a grid of large icons, we find an unusual collection of software. The distribution ships with Google's Chrome web browser which includes Flash support. deepin also offers users the WPS productivity suite, the Deepin Movie video player and the Deepin Music audio player. The multimedia applications are accompanied by media codecs, meaning we can play most media files right away. The distribution also features the GParted partition manager, a system monitor, an image viewer and a PDF document viewer. There is a driver manager which lists available third-party hardware drivers that are compatible with our hardware. New drivers can be installed with just two mouse clicks. deepin features a printer manager, a calculator and text editor. Digging further, we find the GNU Compiler Collection (version 5.3), the systemd init software (version 228) and the Linux kernel (version 4.2).





deepin 15 -- Playing media files with Deepin Move and Deepin Music

(full image size: 572kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



The applications which were provided generally worked well. The WPS suite especially has some nice features, such as providing a list of useful document templates we can preview and download. Adding printers to deepin worked smoothly and the media applications functioned as expected. One program which did not work as expected was the default screen shot utility. The screen shot application offered no delay option when capturing images. It also did not use standard menus or controls, instead displaying a small toolbar with tiny icons and no tool tips to indicate what its buttons would do. This caused me frustration until I finally gave up and downloaded an alternative screen shot utility. Something that I found interesting was neither screen shot application could take pictures of the application menu, configuration panel or virtual workspace manager. When these features were on the screen, both screen shot utilities treated them as though they were not present, capturing pictures of an empty desktop. What I found especially interesting about this was when I used the distribution in 2014, the default screen shot application was able to take pictures of the application menu and configuration panel. Perhaps the change in underlying window manager has altered the way in which some of the Deepin Desktop Environment feature's are displayed and captured.





deepin 15 -- Adding a printer to the system

(full image size: 529kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



I have mentioned deepin's configuration panel a few times and I think it is worth further examination. While most distributions feature a control centre that has its own window and a set of modules we can access one at a time, deepin explores a different approach. Clicking the configuration icon on the desktop's launcher brings up a panel on the right side of the display that takes up about a fifth of the screen. Arranged down the left side of this panel are icons that represent various groups of settings such as the time, networking and users. Hovering the mouse pointer over one of these icons brings up a tool tip with the category's name. The icons act as tabs and clicking one changes the rest of the panel into a configuration screen for the given category.



In this way, the configuration panel acts less like a normal application window and more like a drawer that we can pull onto the desktop, find the setting we want with a click or two and then close the drawer. This not only provides quick access to the operating system's settings, but it keeps them organized and out of the way. I generally found the configuration panel worked well, allowing me to change network settings, create new user accounts and change the appearance of the desktop. The one issue I ran into was at one point the system clock got out of sync. When I went into the Time & Date section of the panel, I found that my time zone was wrong. Attempting to change it, I discovered my time zone was not listed, though it had been available through the system installer. This quirk aside, I very much liked the design of the deepin configuration panel and I found its accessibility made adjusting settings happen more quickly than on other operating systems.



The distribution provides a graphical software manager called Deepin Store. This software manager displays icons which represent categories of software down the left side of the window. On the right we see applications listed in the selected category. The appearance of Deepin Store is a lot like Ubuntu's Software Centre or Linux Mint's Software Manager. Clicking an application's entry brings up a page with detailed information on the software and we can click a button to install the software. Deepin Store tended to work well and I found the categories easy to navigate, but I did run into two issues. One was that programs would not always install successfully and a few times I ended up queuing a package a second time to get it to install. This may have been due to network time-outs. The other issue was I sometimes was unable to find software in the Deepin Store that I knew to be available in the distribution's parent, Debian. I found that switching to the command line and using the APT package manager allowed me to find the applications I was unable to locate through Deepin Store.





deepin 15 -- The Deepin Store software manager

(full image size: 654kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



I did not find any way to install software updates through Deepin Store and so I again turned to the APT command line package manager when I wanted to check for software updates. On the first day of my trial, APT found 125 updated packages in deepin's repositories, totalling 153MB in size. These downloaded and installed, but upon completing the update process, the operating system froze, forcing a hard shutdown of the computer. When I rebooted, deepin ran smoothly without giving a clue as to what had gone wrong during the update.



Conclusions



The deepin distribution was perhaps best described as my dark horse of 2014, one of the distributions which surprised me with its stability, unusual (yet highly efficient) desktop design and many handy features. When I reviewed deepin in 2014, I came away with mostly positive feelings, despite there being a few small translation issues.



Now, in early 2016, I have a less positive experience to report after using deepin. Some aspects of the distribution are still quite good. For example, the installer is very streamlined and easy to navigate. The configuration panel is easy to use and I very much like its design. The desktop environment still does a good job of borrowing ideas from both mobile and traditional desktop interfaces. I was especially happy to note language translations have been updated and deepin presented me with fluent English on every screen. However, there were several problems I encountered too.



Right from the start, the installer crashed the first two times I tried to run it. deepin would boot without problems in VirtualBox, but I could not get the system to boot on my desktop in Legacy BIOS mode and I could not access the live desktop when UEFI was enabled. During the installation my time zone was available, but it seemed to not be present from the control panel.



The first time I installed software updates, the system froze and I was not able to find all the available desktop applications I wanted in Deepin Store. Though a minor concern, it bothered me that I was unable to take screen shots of deepin's more interesting desktop features, something I was able to do in 2014. Finally, I found that if I copied an icon from the application menu to the launcher, it would remain there only until I logged out. Upon logging back in, the icon I had placed on the launcher had disappeared and I would need to find it again in the application menu.



In short, I think deepin has more rough edges now than it did a year and a half ago. The overall design is very nice, in my opinion, but the implementation feels less solid now. I am not sure if this is a result of changing window managers or perhaps due to changing the distribution's base from Ubuntu to Debian Unstable. Perhaps it is a combination of both changes. For now, I can say I still like the interface design deepin's developers have created, but I think some underlying pieces have bugs that need to be addressed. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card