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Review: deepin 25.0.1
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
After a handful of days with deepin, I'm still not sure how to feel about this distribution. Part of this internal conflict arises because I think the distribution is doing a good job at identifying and (mostly) delivering features a lot of people want, but they are not features I want. Lots of people want a modern, glass-themed desktop with attractive visual effects, a built-in AI agent, and immutable filesystem. These are things I have no desire to have on my system. I am clearly not the target audience; deepin is aiming to attract people who are more mainstream.
To the development team's credit, I think they are doing a mostly-good job at delivering these features. The Deepin desktop is beautiful, it is easy to navigate, it is flexible, and it's possible to turn off the visual effects. I think the team deserves a lot of credit for their work on polishing the desktop. However, the desktop environment was not stable for me, and that was a problem throughout my trial.
In a similar fashion, the AI agent is pleasantly accessible (thanks to shortcut keys), it has flexibility in terms of providers, and it's easy to navigate. However, it doesn't recognise my (spoken) language and it was unable to answer any of my questions, even questions about the product on which it was installed. This is a pretty severe oversight if the deepin team wants the AI agent to offer support to their users.
Following this line of thought, I love that deepin is unifying its package management. The software centre seamlessly merges Deb and portable package management. I found the App Store to be easy to navigate. At the same time, the software centre is slow and locks up frequently while working, so I wouldn't recommend it to newcomers yet.
I also like deepin's approach to organising the system installer. It's streamlined and easy to navigate. The process is quick and pretty straightforward. At the same time, the system installer claims it needs a 64GB partition, only allows me to create a 27GB partition, and then uses less than 14GB of disk space. None of that part of the experience made any sense to me.
Finally, in the list of features in development, I'd like to acknowledge the deepin team is making progress with providing an immutable filesystem, but it's only immutable in some ways (somehow) and I couldn't find a way to rollback changes. In sort, it has the limitations of an immutable systems, but it doesn't appear to have the perks yet.