Is Deepin Linux The Windows Killer? (Deepin 20.3 First Look)

today i'm going to be taking a look at the recently released deepen 20.3 now deepen is a rather interesting distribution it's a distribution i quite like because i think deepen is very innovative deepen is a chinese distribution they based off of debian and they have their own custom desktop environment the deepened desktop environment or dde for short and it is a gorgeous desktop environment like it it just makes windows 11 look like straight garbage right the mac os can't even compare to how just beautiful gorgeous it's a work of art this deep and desktop environment so i really love the deep and linux distribution because i think they're innovative i think they are really helping push forward linux on the desktop more so than maybe any distribution out there and a lot of this has to do with of course most distributions that are focused on desktop linux or small distributions have small development teams a small number of contributors they don't have a lot of funds or if any funds behind them we're deepin actually has a large development team and some money behind it and they're doing big things their custom desktop environment the deep and desktop environment is amazing they have their own suite of applications to go with the deep and desktop environment and that's why i enjoy looking at deep and every time they have a new release so the new version 20.3 was just released about four days ago if i switch over to my browser here and you can see that the main site for deepen is deepen.org and you can see it is in chinese so it is based out of china this particular distribution so when you go to the website and you see all the chinese i know immediately a lot of people get put off because they're thinking well i speak english and i i how am i going to get proper documentation on this distribution well all you need to do on the website is just go to language and instead of chinese choose english and you know everything will be in english including the latest release notes for deepen 20.3 now i'm gonna go ahead and download the latest iso the iso is about three gigs in size but oddly enough if you're new to deepen and if you're going to try deepen especially if you're going to install it in a virtual machine which is what i'm going to do today know that the deepon installer requires you to have at least 60 gigabytes of disk space which is a huge amount of disk space for a linux distribution so let me switch over to my desktop here and i'm going to run through a quick installation of 20.3 here inside a virtual machine i'm going to install this inside vert manager so i'm going to choose the very first option from the boot menu which is install deepen 20.3 with kernel 5.10 all right and the live environment has booted up and the very first selection is our language by default it looks like it is chosen chinese so i need to select english here and then i have read the end user license agreement and the privacy policy and then i click next friendly note you're installing deepen in a virtual machine which may result in sub-optimal performance for best experience please install deepen on a real machine so this message has been here forever for deepen for years and i understand why they want to warn people that are trying things out in a virtual machine that it doesn't work quite like it does on a real machine i think most people understand that but i i think that's probably not something that's needed because i i think they scare people from actually trying deepen when you leave a note like that so anyway i'm going to click next and let's go ahead and create our partition so i created a 70 gig disk here because again it needs at least a 60 gig disk so i gave it a a 70 gig disc just to be safe here and then i if i click on that it tells me what it's going to do to the disk it's going to create a two gig boot disk and then a 19 gig extend 4 partition at slash data and then it's going to create a 15 gig partition another extend 4 partition on root and then it's going to create an 11 gig partition on slash recovery and then a 15 gig extend 4 partition on root b and then a 8 gig swap which is really unnecessary for this vm but that's why it needed 60 gigs of disk it's not going to install 60 gigabytes of stuff of programs right but their partition scheme is quite exotic and that's why when you're creating six partitions here that's why it needed a such a big disk and then you have the option to encrypt the disk or not i'm not going to encrypt it for this vm i'm going to click next it's going to tell me exactly what the partition scheme is one more time so i can review it do we want to create a backup for system restore no i don't need to do that not for this virtual machine install so i'll tick that off and click continue and now this portion of the installer will take a few minutes you do have a very nice slideshow going on here and you can actually click forward and backwards through the slideshow it's going to tell you about some of the custom deepen applications as well very cool very professional product right this is a really slick linux distribution and this portion of the installation took just about three or four minutes here on my machine here so let me click reboot now and reboot my virtual machine here into our freshly installed deepen 20.3 right and then when it reboots it asks us the language again although this time it remembers i guess since we selected english in the actual installation it remembers that we're probably wanting english here once again we've already read the end user license agreement and privacy policy this time it's ticked on by default because probably because we ticked it on by default during the installation so click next keyboard layout i want english us it's selected by default it probably picked that based on the language selection from before and then select a time zone so i am actually in the central time zone here in the us i'll just pick chicago in the central time zone for the us and then click next create an account so we need to create our password and our username so my username is going to be dt the hostname of the computer by default it looks like it's going to create it as dt-pc that's fine and then let's create a strong and complicated password for the dt user actually before we do that we need to create a username longer than three characters okay so it looks like we need to create a strong and complicated username as well so my username needs to be derrick instead of just dt so now let's create that strong and complicated password that's weak okay i don't care if it's weak i don't that's not a weak password this password i use all the time and i it's never been cracked anyway let me click next tuning the system applying changes to your system please wait all right and looks like the installation has completed now let's go ahead and enter our super secure password to log in all right and it asks us do we want effects mode or normal mode so effects mode is going to have a little more uh bling to it as far as blurring and window animations and stuff like that now that is going to be a little texting on your cpu for your computer so if you have really weak machines then turning on effect mode is probably not a good idea if you have a modern machine it's okay normal mode of course would be better for older machines i'm going to choose effect mode i do want all the fancy animations and blurring and everything the first thing i want to do though is i want to adjust the screen resolution so if i go to the menu down here and i search for display my display does not come up with anything how about monitor system monitor comes up how about screen well what do i change the screen resolution with i mean i could enter a terminal and use the x render command but i would assume they had a graphical way of doing this how about settings well i know they have a like a settings manager kind of tool i've used it before it must be under a different name actually let me look down here in the dock because i see the little cog wheel here so this is probably the settings manager they call it the control center so i was searching i guess for the wrong name and under control center you'll find the display program and here is where you can change your screen resolution so i'm going to go down here and i'm going to change to 1920 by 1080 and save that and now i have a proper screen resolution here and now let's go ahead and go through the little welcome program here for deepen i click on that is ah it's going to be a video and i don't have audio turned on for you guys to listen to this it wouldn't be picked up on the video but that is really really cool that you get like a welcome video to tell you about everything if i click next here tells us about fashion mode and efficient mode so this is the panel modes so fashion mode is what we're in now it's got the rounded corners and it's got a little padding around the panel efficient mode is the more traditional panel where it's you know butted up right against the bottom of the screen and i to be honest i kind of like the efficient mode i know it's kind of old school but i'm an old-school kind of guy i kind of like the efficient mode more than the fashion mode so i'm actually going to turn that on for efficiency and then effects mode we've already got turned on but if we were having problems if the computer was acting a little sluggish with the effects mode which in this vm everything seems to be working just fine but if it wasn't i could go ahead and turn on normal mode to get rid of some of the window animations and blurring and things like that that are slowing us down i'm going to click next and then choose an icon theme honestly the default icon theme looks beautiful to me i don't know why i would change it so we've got bloom it's the icon theme there's bloom classic and then bloom classic dark and then just bloom dark yeah i'm just going to go with the defaults for now so i think the first thing i want to do now is actually go back to the control center because that's where we're going to have most of our settings the first thing most people will probably want to do not everybody likes light themes and i personally don't like light themes either i want dark themes right i i want my windows to be a dark color instead of this blinding white so i'm going to go under personalization and under personalization you have general themes now do you want a light theme a dark theme or auto which i'm assuming auto would allow you to select certain applications to be light certain applications to be dark that is actually a really nice feature because that's not something available really in any other distribution that i know of but i want everything to be dark so i'm going to choose the dark theme and then the accent color right now it's set to blue the accent color is going to be the accents for you well you see around general around personalization you have a blue border you see the widgets here are all blue the sliders are all blue we could change that accent color to something else for example we could do that reddish color or orange or green or a lighter blue if we didn't like the darker blue the purple here that's quite nice or you know some people would prefer maybe a gray i'm going to go with the default though i think the blue looks quite stunning now during the welcome screen we already chose an icon theme but if we wanted to select something different we could and there's more icon themes than just the four that were in the welcome screen looks like the papyrus icon set is also here uh vintage is also here uh that's very old-school looking then we have our cursor theme i'm just going to go with their default which is called bloom but you have the edwada cursor theme if you wanted to change that and then the system fonts by default they're using nodo sans and nodo mono for the system fonts now let me close that out and if i right click on the desktop and i go to wallpaper and screensaver their wallpaper utility is rather interesting because it is more like the wallpaper utility unlike the android operating system you have this slider at the bottom that you can search through wallpapers and you can actually have a wallpaper slideshow if you prefer but i'm just going to go through some of the wallpapers that are available here the wallpaper pack looks like it's all nature photographs and these are these are just beautiful wallpapers by the way yeah i really like that it's a nice wallpaper i may actually use that one you know what let's just go ahead and set that as both our wallpaper and our screen saver another cool thing with the deepen desktop environment is the start menu if you will you know you have this traditional kind of start menu that pretty much anybody wouldn't know how to navigate and then you also have this almost like full screen icon here and if you do that the menu actually becomes like a full screen menu it becomes like a full screen menu that you would find in the gnome shell or in kde plasma for those that use the full screen kde plasma menu and then in the full screen mode here you have this icon out to the side which is rather interesting because then it breaks everything down by category that is actually a really nice touch i mean this is i i personally would rather use the traditional panel you know as far as a menu system but i really think that if you are going to create something like this they've done a really nice job with this this is much better much more intuitive very clean very slick looking much more so than the gnome menu system one thing i noticed about the start menu here is we have a little icon here that's a avatar you will see my username is derek and by default it shows this this picture here i guess if you you're on a multi-user system it will let you know you know who you're logged in as and of course you've got several default images i could choose from if i wanted to change you know to the kitten here you know i could do that if i click on it again you have the plus sign down here so i could actually add my own custom image and this is typically what you would do is you would snap a picture of yourself with your webcam if you wanted a picture of your actual face as the avatar it just makes it a little easier when you're logging in so you make sure you know exactly which user you're logging in as i mentioned that deepen other than having its own desktop environment also they develop their own custom suite of applications most of the apps installed by default are custom deepen applications including the file manager here if i click on the little menu here and i go to about this is file manager version 5.5.1 so it doesn't really give me like the proper program name it's just a generic name file manager i kind of hate it when gnome labels everything with generic names i i kind of hate it that deepan does that too i wish they'd just give me the actual name of the program because i actually don't know the name of this file manager i'm sure i could open a terminal and figure it out rather quickly but i'm not going to do that right now anyway this file manager is really interesting right it doesn't look like any file manager you've ever used and it's it's rather like i said it's rather cool one thing i could do is i could go into settings for me being more of a power user i don't like having big icons i also don't like the hidden files and directories not being shown so i'm going to go into view here and i'm going to make sure that the default size is small the default view is a list view i want to show the hidden files and let's put that into effect close that and i guess i have to restart the file manager for that to take action no that still did not take effect what am i missing here no we did the list view i wonder why that that did not take effect uh i had to leave the current directory i'm at and then come back to it for it to take effect that's weird that's probably a bit of a bug it probably should just automatically take effect but i i for those of you that run into that problem yeah leave the current directory and then just come back to it and then you've got the list view and now we have our actual dot files the hidden files the files and directories that begin with a period now if i go down here to my bash rc file and i right click on it and i go to the properties here and i just want to see what they allow you to change here inside the graphical file manager can we change file permissions file ownership things like that well it looks like we have three blocks here we have this basic info block here and that tells us the size the type the time created accessed and modified so some useful information but i'm going to collapse that box and then i'm going to expand this one now this is really neat open with and we have i guess two text editing programs installed we have the standard text editor just a plain text editor and then libreoffice writer and you could actually select which one you want this particular file to open in now the bash rc always needs to open in a plain text editor so libreoffice writer wouldn't be appropriate for that but some programs may be it would be appropriate for so that actually is a really neat feature that you can actually specify exactly what a file should open in as far as what program it should open in and then permission should just be the standard read write execute permissions so you can adjust that you can click the box here allow to execute as program so if you have a script that you downloaded from the internet and wanted to execute it until you actually tick that box on you can't actually execute it so that's how you would run a script for example that you you got from github so let me go ahead and get out of the file manager the file manager i will say looks very nice let's take a look at their web browser because that really is the most important program on the system and if i go to about and this is browser version 5.4.10 again a generic name but you guys can probably tell that this is based off of chromium you can see even the icon it's not the chromium icon but you can tell it's it's very chromium-like with the white and blue swirling around actually if i read a little further i can actually see this browser is made possible by the chromium open source project and other open source software so it is basically a chromium skin and it looks quite nice you know the chromium browser if you've seen it once you've seen it a million times this is kind of like the standard default browser these days and then going through the quick launchers here we have the app store let's take a look at the deep in store i do notice that the deep in store does not respect a dark theme the way everything else is maybe they just haven't implemented a dark theme if i go to settings it doesn't look like there's any way to actually set it to a dark theme so i guess this is just permanently a light theme for now but it does look good we've got editors choices hot updates and then some various categories we could select i will say it's a very clean look if i search for something to install i don't know if htop is installed by default or not but it's just an example of something we could search for sorry we did not find that out they didn't find h-top what about vim i don't know if vm has installed by default either but yeah i just wanted to pick something that we could actually install and i don't think it was installed by default because it said we could install it you can see we get a little percentage going on here as far as the download percentage you see i get a notification here vm installed successfully so that is the software center it looks like it's working just fine just quickly going through some of the other custom defend applications we have their custom photo application and in this new vm i don't have any photos to take a look at but it's just your standard photo managing application and then we have their music application as well again i don't have any music installed on the system but as your your standard audio player it respects the dark theme as well so that's very cool and it minimizes to the tray here you saw when i actually opened it up it asked me on close did i want to really close it or do i want it just to be minimized in the system tray so that's really nice that you have that option then we have the calendar application which just looks like a standard calendar i wonder like if today is the 30th if i yeah right click on it new event i could actually leave a note so yes so it's like a scheduling like an organizing kind of application that could be very useful i noticed on the desktop it left some icons for vm when we installed it i guess in case we couldn't find it in the menu system although it's clearly in the menu system here so i don't like desktop icons they don't really make any sense for me uh so personally i would just delete these so just get rid of them you don't actually uninstall the program it's still there you're just getting rid of the the icons on the desktop it's perfectly safe to do that now let me open the deep end terminal if i hit control alt t that should open a terminal for us yes and that's a standard key binding in most desktop linux distributions control alt t will typically bring up a terminal and a control plus usually zooms in if you need to zoom in on the text not something most people need to do i do that because i'm recording my screen and i want you guys to actually see what i type here so i'm going to do a unnamed space dash or this will give us the current kernel version we're on kernel 5.10.60 so i actually thought we would be on a newer kernel than this maybe we need to update the system so if i do a sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade let's see how many updates are available and that command sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade is the standard way to update your system for debian and all debian based distributions and it looks like there's just a few packages that need to be updated here i will go ahead and take the update the linux kernel is not one of the packages it's updating so i think yeah the kernel is 5.10.60 by default here well that kind of confuses me a little bit that we're on a older kernel the only reason i i was thinking it would be a newer kernel is because earlier when i pulled up the release notes one of the very first things i didn't actually read the entire release notes here but in deepen 20.3 the stable kernel is upgraded to version 5.15. so that's weird that the did i not installed the 20.3 release of deepen maybe i install accidentally grabbed the wrong iso let me actually search for about sorry like an about or a system information kind of program if i go to device manager here so i see overview and it just gives me some information about the virtual machine i created what graphics driver how much ram and all of that well i could get the uh release version of depend from the command line so if i do control alt t to bring up that terminal once again i'll make it full screen and zoom in on linux if you do this command here lsb underscore release space and give it the dash a flag it should tell us what version of your distribution you're currently running and yeah this is deepen 20.3 so yeah there's some kind of disconnect from the release notes that said we would be on kernel 5.15 and the kernel that we're actually on here is actually 5.10 it's not a big deal both kernels are going to work just fine it's not like there's it would matter to very very few people but i just thought that was strange some other things i want to briefly mention down here on the right side of the panel of course we have the cis tray and it is collapsible so if you have a ton of stuff in the sis tray you can actually collapse it to hide it and then you have this magnifying glass which is i believe is a run launcher yes so we could search for something i don't know search for vm for example it'll open a vm that looks like gvm actually then we have other standard stuff like our power sessions to reboot or shut down the machine then we have our clock date and time and if you hit it the calendar comes up we have our recycle bin the trash bin and then we have our notifications this is really interesting if you click on it a sidebar comes out and this is where you would have all of your notifications there's currently no notifications listed right now because i guess i've cleared them all out i've had a few that have popped up along the way while recording but i've deleted them so that's all i wanted to show you guys today that's just a very cursory overview of the newly released deepen 20.3 i think it's a gorgeous desktop environment it's always been a gorgeous desktop environment ever since defend first came out several years ago demon's been around uh six seven eight years now i think and even in the early days they were really pushing the boundaries of the desktop environment and i think even more so today i think it's one of those things especially as we try to convert windows users and mac users over to linux many windows users and mac users that have never tried linux they imagine that the linux desktop is old and ugly it's going to look like windows 98 right and in many cases they would have been right just a few years ago our desktop environments don't look good right and then they're kind of it's not that they don't function correctly it's just we don't focus on the finer details the real spit and polish of making a beautiful desktop and that's something that the deepen guys are trying to address and i think the deepened distribution will make real inroads as more and more people try to get away from windows and move over to linux on the desktop now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode devin gabe james matt michael mitchell paul scott west sakami allen linux ninja chuck commander angry kirk dyokai david dilling gregory heiko costco lee max and mike nitrix eryon alexander peace orchard fedora polytechnic private stephen and willie these guys they're my highest earned patrons over on patreon they are the producers of this first look at deep in 20.3 well i also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names are seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because the distrotube channel i don't have any corporate sponsors it's just me and you guys the community if you like my work and want to support me please subscribe to distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace windows 11 looks like dog compared to deepen

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 189,524

Keywords: deepin linux, deepin desktop environment, deepin 20, linux distribution, deepin linux 2021, deepin 20.3, macos alternative, desktop enviorment, debian based, gnu linux, chinese linux, linux distro 2021, most beautiful linux distro, top beautiful linux distro, windows vs linux, switch to linux, linux is better than windows, linux is better than mac, free software, open source, linux review, linux distro, windows alternative os, distrotube

Id: 29onMCIbbXc

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021