 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 base off of Debian and they have their own custom desktop environment, the Deepen desktop environment or DDE for short, and it is a gorgeous desktop environment. Like 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 Deepen desktop environment. So I really love the Deepen 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 are 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, where Deepen actually has a large development team and some money behind it. And they're doing big things. Their custom desktop environment, the Deepen desktop environment is amazing. They have their own suite of applications to go with the Deepen desktop environment. And that's why I enjoy looking at Deepen 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 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 everything will be in English, including the latest release notes for Deepen 20.3. Now, I'm going to 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 Deepen installer requires you to have at least 60 gigabytes of disk space, which is a huge amount of disk space for 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 are installing Deepen in a virtual machine, which may result in suboptimal 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 think that's probably not something that's needed because 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 70 gig disk just to be safe here. And then 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 for partition at slash data, and then it's going to create a 15 gig partition, another extend for partition on route. And then it's going to create an 11 gig partition on slash recovery. And then a 15 gig extend for partition on root B and then a eight 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. That's why when you're creating six partitions here, that's why it needed 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 deep end applications as well. Oh, 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. And to our freshly installed deep end 20.3. All 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. It's selected by default. It probably picked that based on the language selection from before. And then selected time zone. So I am actually in the central time zone here in the U.S. I'll just pick Chicago in the central time zone for the U.S. 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 host name of the computer. By default, it looks like it's going to create it as DT dash 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 Derek 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. That is not a weak password. This is a password I use all the time and it's never been cracked. Anyway, let me click next, tuning the system, applying changes to your system. Please wait. All right. And it 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 a fixed mode or normal mode? So a fixed mode is going to have a little more bling to it as far as blurring and window animations and stuff like that. Now that is going to be a little taxing 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 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 when 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 Deepin. I click on that is 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, it 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 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 is 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 and not everybody likes light themes. And I personally don't like light themes either. I want dark themes, right? 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 like 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 what 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 you know, lighter blue. If we didn't like the darker blue, the purple here. And 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 a 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. Vintage is also here. And 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 Edweta cursor theme, if you wanted to change that. And then the system fonts by default, they're using noto sands and noto mono for the system fonts. 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 on like 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 peg looks like it's all nature photographs. And these are these are just beautiful wallpapers, by the way. Yeah, I really like that. That'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 screensaver. Another cool thing with the deepened desktop environment is the start menu, if you will, 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 Gnomeshell 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 personally would rather use the traditional panel 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 Gnomeshell menu system. One thing I noticed about the start menu here is we have a little icon here. That's an avatar. You will see my username is Derek. And by default, it chose this picture here. I guess if you were on a multi user system, it will let you know, you know, who you're logged in as. And of course we've got several default images I could choose from if I wanted to change, you know, to the kitten here. I could do that if I click on it again. And 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. Now 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 five dot five dot one. 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 kind of hate it that deepen does that too. I wish they 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 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 then 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. 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 for those of you that run into that problem, you 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 LibreOfficeWriter, 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 LibreOfficeWriter wouldn't be appropriate for that, but some programs maybe 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 permission. 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 take that box on, you can't actually execute it. So that's how you would run a script, for example, that 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 very Chromium like with the white and blue swirling around. Actually, if I had read a little further here, 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 Deepin Store. I do notice that the Deepin 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 H-top is installed by default or not, but it's just an example of something we could search for. Sorry, we did not find that app. They didn't find H-top. What about Vim? I don't know if Vim is 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 of Vim 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 Deepin applications. We have their custom photo application 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 it's 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 closed, 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 if today is the 30th, if I right-click on it, new event, I could actually leave a note. 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 Vim 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. 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 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 Control-Plus usually zooms in. 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 gonna do a unamespace-r. 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 sudo apt upgrade, let's see how many updates are available. And that command, sudo apt update 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 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 Debian 20.3, the stable kernel is upgraded to version 5.15. So that's weird that the, did I not install the 20.3 release of Debian? Maybe I installed, accidentally grabbed the wrong ISO. Let me actually search for about. So like an about or a system information kind of program. If I go to device manager here. So let's 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 release version of Debian 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 deep in 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 gonna work just fine. It's not like it would matter to very, very few people. But I just thought that was strange. Some other things I wanna briefly mention down here on the right side of the panel. Of course, we have the SysTray and it is collapsible. So if you have a ton of stuff in the SysTray, 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 VIM, for example. A little bit of VIM, like GVIM, 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 Deepin 20.3. I think it's a gorgeous desktop environment. It's always been a gorgeous desktop environment. Ever since Deepin first came out several years ago, Deepin's been around 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 gonna 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 kinda, 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 Deepin guys are trying to address. And I think the Deepin 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. Devon Gabe James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell Paul, Scott Wess, Akami Allen, Linux Ninja, Chuck, Commander, Angry Kurt, Diokai, David, Dylan Gregory, Heiko, Casca, Lee Maxim, Mike Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace Arch, Invador, Polytech, Raven, Red Prophet, Steven, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-eared patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this first look at Deepin 20.3. Well, I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're 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. All right, guys. Peace. Windows 11 looks like dogs compared to Deepin.