Deepin 23: a beautiful, really disappointing update

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Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
00:42 Sponsor: TuxCare
01:56 Initial Setup
04:13 Deepin Desktop: Unchanged?
10:17 AI Features: big miss
14:24 Linyapps: is this just a Flatpak fork?
16:53 Parting Thoughts
20:01 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
20:45 Support the channel

Deepin is clearly looking more at Windows than macOS nowadays, with the taskbar at the bottom, and both styles you can pick from being basically Windows 10 or Windows 11.

The main menu is alright, with app search, the ability to sort applications by name, or freely by drag and drop in the list of apps, and a frequent and recently installed section.

I quite liked the Quick Actions module at the bottom right of the task bar, it's a very smartphone like interface, but practical.

In terms of personalization, you have the usual suspects, dark and light mode, accent colors, some form of global theme that changes accent colors, wallpapers and icons, or you can just change the icons and cursors individually, and the fonts. It's definitely no KDE or no Cinnamon here, and these theme changes don't apply uniformly to other apps.

Default apps are still in that same ballpark of being basic and simple, but being barely enough for anyone who just needs a computer for office work, email, and web browsing. It's all fine, but it hasn't progressed much since the last time I used Deepin.

Finally, Deepin is still stuck on X11. The betas talked about having experimental Wayland support, they couldn't ship with it in the end, and it's not there yet.

Finally, you have access to cross device sharing your clipboard to another computer, transfering files to other computers, or sharing the mouse cursor, unfortunately, that only works between computers running Deepin, or between Deepin and Windows.

Now, what sets Deepin apart from other distros and desktops, is its integration of AI features. First, is what they call UOS AI, its icon is present by default in the system tray, and it's basically just a gateway for you to have the various AI tools you use inside your OS: it doesn't come with its own model or anything, you need to enter an API key for any of the supported models, like GPT 3.5, GPT 4, and a few others that only have Chinese names that I can't read.

Deepin also includes the ability to build your own personal knowledge assistant, but it depends on the same models you have to configure.

And unfortunately, this is also true for the last feature is the Deepin System Assistant, an AI powered tool that lets you ask questions about how your system works. It's fine to try and simplify access to AI tools by giving users a single interface to let them access various types of assistants, but if you also expect users to actually generate API keys and enter them here, then it means your implementation of AI is not ready for prime time, and so your implementation at the OS level is not that useful, because anyone who knows how to generate a key and use it, and fix the errors, they have a paid account, and thy don't need your watered down interface.

Another thing introduced in Deepin 23 is what they call Linyaps, this is a new packaging format that Deepin created, and they started using that format for some of their own applications. It's another sandboxed format like Snaps or Flatpaks, where you build your app once for each architecture, and you don't need to build it for each distro and each distro's version. They have their own section in the App Store, with a bunch iof apps already, although most of these seem t be chinese apps that have untranslated names.

[bvd_vlvd]

We got Nick saying Rizzler after KDE 6

[antifocus]

Just want to add to that 666 is a Chinese internet slang mostly used to react to something dope.

[TheNeverPoet]

Nick saying Rizzler before GTA 6... it's over guys

[adityaREDFLAG]

“I am not rizzler as the kids say” Bro doesn’t realise using Linux is rizz 😏

[thelakeman]

7:26 this probably has more to do with it being a China first distro. Since there's no google services everyone wants to make their own account and sync service, you see this even with Chinese phone makers selling internationally, Xiaomi devices try to get you to have a Xiaomi account or Oppo devices doing the same with heytap despite all of them supporting standard google services on android. Deepin could implement syncing with nextcloud and all the usual cloud providers but they probably don't care enough for the international release to do that.

[zexuanqiao]

666 in Chinese means "cool bro" rather than the number of the beast

[Skeleman]

Maybe Deepin will be the thing that breaks the trend, but most things that China produces start out unpolished and then quickly become the most dominant version without anyone realizing.

[hoangminhnguyen]

I guess deepin have more interest at normal Chinese computer users than others. Which is understandable.

[JerziTBoss]

No matter what OS, if there is AI built in, I hope there is a way to completely remove it. I don't want any AI assistant potentially scraping my actions and files to train itself.

I guess Deepin devs sank a lot of effort to be first Linux environment with AI when the effoct could be used better elsewhere.

[guss]

The default 125% scaling by default on 1080p is an MS-Windows thing, which they probably just copied uncritically.

[cameronbosch]

8:40 Actually, X11 _can_ run in a better and more secure mode with forks such as Xenocara (mainly used by OpenBSD) but XOrg on Linux, yeah, that's going to die very soon because of the other issues (like "multi monitor support is extremely poor" being an understatement) and I'm shocked that Deepin _still_ hasn't started any public work on a Wayland session...

[Cyco_Nix]

So basically, Deepin is what we expected. Beauty is only skin deep.

[marloelefant]

AI assistance is actually the last they should focus on, when they other stuff is sufficiently polished. They really put the wrong focus.

[jarekzawadzki]

The Chinese way of showing the number six using fingers looks similar to a phone receiver and a devil with horns at the same time – it's a double pun.

[wafelranger]

Nick using gen alpha slang before kde 7 is crazy

[thelakeman]

3:47 I feel called out, though deepin probably does it because that's the default behaviour of windows.

[AlthafMuhammad]

What is the name of the font you are using in kde plasma shown in the video?

[Ateshtesh]

2:42 Is not the number of the beast (that BTW is actually originally was 616 but change in the time take it to 666), but is 六六六 (liùliùliù) It has the same pronunciation with 溜溜溜 (liùliùliù) and is very similar to 牛牛牛 (niúniúniú), which came from 牛逼 (niúbī) – “cool”, “amazing” (which is a very colloquial word, by the way). It’s also very close in meaning to 厉害 (lìhai), which means “awesome”.

The point is Chinese people play with the numbers, 4 (si) sounds like d*ad, then they avoid it.
(6) Liu is more like lucky or cool, that is ahy in Dragon Ball Z you can see gohan in a car that has the number 666 in the ending. (japan take a lot from chinese culture).

Now you know.

[MrMysticphantom]

A lot of these restrictions seem to be coming from their collaboration with Chinese Govt, and Universities in an effort to help them migrate over to linux from Windows. Also much of the design and shit we would find cringe in the west are what's actually popular and common in Chinese and Japanese oriented apps. They have ... different ... preferences on UI and UX there

Also on the X11 front... There is a reason why they still use it... Because the lack of security is currently a feature for surveillance NOT a bug. Until they have finished they're tooling and methods for other means of surveillance that will work on Wayland it'll stay X11. Let's not mention the fact that their package format has several "phone home" items (mostly incomplete) that fall straight into surveillance (which includes keylogging btw)

[osgrov]

I wish they would focus all their efforts on the desktop environment and just dump the distro. Deepin DE is gorgeous and might become a serious contender if they gave it more attention (and it needs it). Here's hoping. :)