 Today, I'm going to be doing a quick installation and first look at the recently released Deepen 20.1. Deepen is a Chinese based Linux distribution. It is based on Debian, the current version, Deepen 20.1 is based on Debian 10.6, and Deepen has always been one of those distributions that I often install on friends and family computers. I've actually had Deepen running on some of my test laptops in years past. And I've always liked Deepen as a distribution, and I've always liked the Deepen desktop environment. I think it is maybe the most modern, most attractive, the most Windows-like desktop environment we have available in Linux. I think it's one of those distributions and one of those desktop environments that we should be showing potential new Linux users because I think it's one of those desktop environments that has a well factor, like people that don't know anything about Linux. You know, you don't want to show them XFCE because that's not attractive. That's not exciting. But the Deepen desktop environment has a real well factor that has always impressed me. And typically when I put it on friends and family computers, they really love Deepen. And it's proved to be a rather stable distribution on all the machines I've ever put it on. So today, I wanted to take a look at this new release and the release announcement over here at distrowatch.com. If you go to the Deepen website, you'll also find the release announcement. The Deepen website, of course, is in Chinese, so you will have to change the language by default. It's in Chinese, but you can switch over to English here. The website's loading a little slowly. And of course, we have the 20.1 release announcement here. The website, of course, is Deepen.org. I will actually link to this release announcement in the show description. Today, I'm going to be doing a quick installation and first look at Deepen inside a VM. I'm going to install Deepen 20.1 inside Vert Manager. So let me switch over to my desktop here. And again, this is a VM here. So this is inside Vert Manager. And I'm going to go ahead and run through the installation. I haven't actually done an installation of Deepen in a while. So I don't know if the installation process has changed, if the installer has changed since the last time I've done this. One thing to note here is I do know the installer recommends you have at least 64 gigs of disk space to install Deepen. Now, that's way overkill. There's no way that Deepen installation is going to install 64 gigs of stuff. But just know that the installer will check for that. So I did create a, I think a 70 gig virtual hard drive for this virtual machine just to be on the safe side, just to make sure that I don't come to that portion of the installer and then get prevented from going further in the installation because the disk is too small. So the first thing you need to do, of course, is select your language by default. It will be Chinese. So you want to select English or whatever language it is that you want the installer to actually present. And then you need to agree to the Deepen OS user experience program license agreement. It's just a end user license agreement. You also need to read their privacy policy and agree to that and then click next. And then you are installing Deepen on a virtual machine, which may result in suboptimal performance for the best experience. Please install Deepen on a real machine. This has always been a part of the installer. It always detects whether you're doing this in a VM or on real hardware. If you're doing it in a VM, it's going to tell you, hey, performance is not going to be good in a VM. And the reason is Deepen is kind of a heavy desktop environment. It uses a ton of system resources and it can be slow and buggy in a VM. So it's just warning you guys, if you're doing it in a VM, don't expect the best performance, which is understandable. Now, creating the partitions, so it's going to detect your disk. Now, in this VM, I only have one virtual disk here. I need to select it and then it's going to do the automatic partitioning because I have selected full disk here. And the automatic partitioning is going to do a boot partition that is two gigs. It's going to do slash data, which is 16 gigs, I guess, for recovery. Yeah, we'll just go with it. We'll just do the automatic partitioning. Of course, if you really wanted to, you could manually partition the drives yourself. And then click continue and that should format the drives and start writing to the disk. And we get a progress bar here at the bottom. And I believe this is where it actually starts the installation. So I will pause the recording and I'll come back once this portion of the installation has completed. And that portion of the installation has completed that took, I don't know, five minutes, maybe 10 minutes at the most. And now we need to reboot the system and it has this button at the bottom reboot now. So I'll click that. And it automatically detached the ISO. So I didn't need to actually go in and remove the ISO from the VM. It took care of that automatically. I always like when distributions do that. We had a grub screen that came up to so the installation appears to have went just fine. All right. And now we're back at the installer. But this time it looks like we have different things to go through. So again, English has been selected. It remembered English from me going through it before. But now we are going to select our keyboard layout time zone and all of that. Once again, we have to agree to the end user license agreement. Click next keyboard layout. I want English US, which is selected by default. I guess since I chose English in the previous screen, I'm going to click next on that. We need to select our time zone. I am in the central US. So I'm just going to click somewhere here in the central part of the US. Chicago is not exactly where I'm at, but it is the same time zone. So I will click next. Create an account. I'm going to create a username here. I'm going to call it the user DT. The host name for the computer can be DT-PC. That's what's suggested here. That's fine password. We need to create a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons. So we create a strong and complicated password says, please input a username longer than three characters and shorter than 32 characters. So it's fine with the password being two characters, but the username can't be just two characters. That's weird. I don't think I've ever installed a Linux distribution that didn't allow me to use DT as the username, but hey, since it doesn't like DT, we'll go with Derek. And let's go ahead and click next says tuning the system. Applying changes to your system, please wait. All right. And the system, I guess, rebooted itself. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but the installation program disappeared. And all of a sudden we get to our login manager. So let's go ahead and log in to deepen 20.1. Friendly reminder, it's been detected that we're using a virtual machine and this will impact system performance. So do you want to turn off the effects? So if you turn on effect mode, it has fancy effects and it's really going to slow down the VM, or do you want to do normal mode? Normal mode is probably what we need to do in a VM. Now, on physical hardware, the effects mode is probably fine for most most computers out there, unless it's a really old computer that just has a complete potato for a CPU. Now, before I do anything else, the first thing I want to do is get a proper screen resolution. So I'm going to search for display. About monitor, system monitor. No, how about resolution? I'm not exactly sure. I mean, I could always just open up a terminal, but I was trying to stick with their graphical programs here. So let me just open up a terminal and I'll run it. X-Rander and the available screen resolutions for the X-Rander command 1920 by 1080 is available. So I will do X-Rander space dash S space 1920 by 1080. I'm sure there's a graphical program to change resolutions somewhere in deep end, but I wouldn't know where it was at because just searching for screen monitor display. I didn't get anything returned in the search box here. So I'm not familiar enough with the deep end desktop environment to know exactly the program I'm looking for there. Now, getting into deep end, one of the first things you notice is it is a quite attractive desktop environment. I do like the panel at the bottom. I like the icon set. I don't know if I'm crazy about the space around the panel because you see there is like a 20 pixel padding or so around the edges of the panel and at the bottom of the panel. So it's not really butted up against the edge of the screen. I'm sure I could change that by right click on it. We have mode. This is fashion mode that's ticked on if I go to efficient mode. Yeah, then it butts up right against the edge of the screen like a traditional panel. That's kind of what I would prefer there. It also got rid of the centered quick launcher icons and actually put them closer to the actual start menu. This makes a lot more sense to me. But for those of you that prefer the other way, I mean, you can quickly toggle between that fashion mode and efficient mode for the panel. Now, we do have this little welcome program here. So let me go ahead and click next. And immediately we could have changed it from fashion mode to efficient mode just using this. But we've already taken care of that. Yeah, it's just letting us know a little bit about what we can change as far as the system themes, the icon set. I'm OK with the default icon set. If I go through the start menu here, you know, that default icon set looks good. I don't know if I would change that. So yeah, I'm just going to close out the little help program. The first thing I want to do is go through the menu system and see what all is installed by default, because again, Deepin recommended that you had at least 64 gigs of disk space to be able to install Deepin. That is gigantic. That is probably 10 times the amount of disk space most distributions actually need to install. And I don't think Deepin really needs 64 gigs of disk space. I think that was a gross over estimation of what it actually needs. So let's go through the categories here. Can I actually search by category? It says all categories. OK, there we go. And then I can do the subcategories. We have an internet category where we have browser and mail. It doesn't tell me what browser or email client we have installed because it's using generic names. I hate generic names. Now, that's part of the problem. Why searching in something like the search box could be a problem because if it doesn't search for the program name, but instead search for like the generic label like browser, you know, if I was searching for Firefox, it may not return Firefox, but I actually have to search for browser to actually make that search happen. I don't even know if this is Firefox here, though. What browser are we using? Yeah, I'm not familiar with this at all. So let me go to the about section. This is actually Chrome colon, dash, dash setting. So it's a Chrome based browser at least. But I don't know this might be Chrome. I've never used Chrome. I mean, I don't know anything about it. But this is not what I would expect Chrome to look like. I would expect the about page to actually tell me something about Chrome. It says this browser is made possible by the Chromium open source project and other open source software. So it's talking about open source software. So it's not Google Chrome. So it's some open source variant of Chrome, maybe Chromium. I don't know. Again, it would be better if I could actually get the name of that program instead of just browser. I really wanted to look it up. What I could do is I could open a terminal. And if I assume it's Chromium, what I could do is do a where is and then Chromium. And if Chromium is installed, it would tell me where the binary for Chromium is. I didn't get anything returned, though, so it may not be Chromium. I tried to launch Chromium. By just typing Chromium. Yeah, I'm not sure what that browser is. Let me get back into the menu system, go back to all categories, go to Internet. I'm going to choose the mail client. I expect the email client to also be difficult to figure out what's going on. We have an email address and password to log in. I obviously don't have anything set up. I just wanted to see what email client this was. I don't recognize the settings or anything. So I'm not sure what email client they're using either. Could it be Geary? It's one I've used in the past. I know it's not Thunderbird. It didn't look anything like Thunderbird. If I do where is Geary, no. So yeah, I'm not sure. One thing I could do to try to figure this out is go into Internet. I'm going to open up, let's open up the browser again. And now let me go back and open the terminal. And it's Htop installed. Let's look for the processes that are running. Htop is not installed. Okay, let's do it. Sudo apt install. Htop, if I can type. Give our strong and complicated password. It is frustrating. I do not know what programs are actually running on the system. So let's go ahead and full screen this. And see what the browser that is running right now. A lot of deep and desktop environment stuff running. I don't see. I don't know. I see user lib browser browser. Wow. Even the libraries are just called browser instead of like the actual program name. Let me just close that out. I don't know. Not a very good installation and first look. I mean, typically these are, I want these to be first looks. That's why I don't put any real effort in researching. So the only thing I can tell you guys is that you have a browser and an email client installed. I don't know what they actually are. So I do apologize about that. Let's go back to the categories. There is a music category. And we have a program called music. And I believe this is Deepin's own music player. This is actually just called music version 6.0.1.91. Again, this is one of the deep and desktop environment applications. And if I, well, I could click open folder, but I don't think there's anything on the system. Well, there is a music folder and it does have one thing sitting in that folder. So you can actually test out the music player in a VM. That's cool. I'm not actually going to play that. I'm not exactly sure what it is. It may be copyrighted. I'm not certain on that, but it looks really nice for audio player. The layout and everything, everything kind of looks familiar, right? You know where all the controls and everything are. I'm sure it's a fine program. So let's go ahead and cancel that. Go back to all categories. There is a video category where we have a movie player, screen capture, voice notes, which I'm assuming is like an e-reader or e-speak kind of program and camera, I guess, for webcam. Let's try the movie player. And I believe this is once again one of the original Deepin apps. It's simply called movie and it's version 5.7.6.165. And knowing that their actual program names, I thought they were using generic names by labeling everything. But the program name actually could be movie, right? So if I did a where is browser. And that is actually the name of the browser. Okay, so I finally figured it out. The actual name of the web browser is actually browser. So those were not generic names. Those are the actual names. The email client is actually called mail, right? All right, so music, the program name is actually called music video. The movie player is actually called movie. So you get the idea here. I'm not crazy about that particular naming scheme. That's very confusing. But hey, it's their distro and their desktop environment and their apps. They can name it whatever they want. It's not the worst naming scheme as far as open source software. There's so many bad names of programs in open source software. I won't say they're terrible names. I just will say that using such generic names is kind of confusing. The image viewer, of course, is called image viewer. This is version 5.6.3.73. I wanted to open some images, open up the wallpaper directory here. And we've selected a directory. I guess I actually have to select a specific image. Okay, I see. And from here, you can actually cycle through the images in that directory. Coming back to the menu system, let's go back to the graphics category. We had album, draw, and simple scan, draw. Is that LibreOffice draw? It may be. I'm not sure. No, this doesn't look like a LibreOffice. Now, this is a program that's actually called draw. Draw 5.8.0.83. It looks like it's probably a paint program. That's what I'm guessing it is. Yeah, we could probably open some kind of photo or artwork or whatever and edit it. That is confusing that they call that program draw when LibreOffice has a program called draw. So that's why I thought that might be LibreOffice. Simple scan is a scanning utility. Been around forever. Not too many people have the need for scanners anymore. But if you did, there it is. LibreOffice is installed on the system. But it looks like they have LibreOffice calc, impress, and writer. And of course, just the generic front page to LibreOffice. Here is draw. So is draw actually installed? So this is LibreOffice draw. This is what LibreOffice draw should look like. So the other program was a different drawing program. And if I go to about LibreOffice, let's see what version they're on. They're on version 6.1.5.2. Not the most recent version of LibreOffice. But then again, Deepin is based on Debian. I can go back to the categories. We have a systems category. And this is where you'll find your traditional kind of system apps like your file manager and control center and things like that. System settings. But here is the file manager. And I will say the file manager looks really good. That is a sexy file manager. I'm not going to lie. I really like the look of that. And I would probably want a more traditional look once I started looking around. Like if I go into, I don't know, documents or whatever. Well, that's an empty folder. Let me go back into home. And I actually change how it lists things. Display as list. I didn't click it. There it goes. Display as list. Can I show hidden files and directories? Because I would assume there's some hidden stuff in here that I'm not seeing. Where do I show hidden stuff? Settings maybe? Hidden files. Show hidden files. There we go. All right. Yeah. That's kind of a more traditional look for a file browser. That's probably what I would go with. Instead of the big garish icons. But, you know, some people like the big icon. Look in their file manager. Different strokes for different folks. Some of the other system tools. We saw the terminal earlier. Does control alt T bring up the terminal? Let's see if that particular key binding works. It does. So that is a real positive there. Can I zoom in here? What is the hot keys to zoom in? Control plus to zoom in. I would assume control minus then would zoom back out. Let's look at system resource usage. So let me open up H top. Deepen desktop environment is a heavy desktop environment. It typically sucks up a lot of CPU. And it's using a lot of CPU. We're using like 25%, 30% of the CPU at times. That's extremely high. But again, that's because we're running this in a VM. It typically doesn't run great in a VM. RAM usage. RAM usage is actually pretty decent. 605 megs of RAM of the eight gigs of RAM. I gave this VM. So that's pretty respectable. Just know it's going to use a lot of CPU inside of VM. So let's check out the kernel. So if I did a U name, let's do U name dash R. This is using an older kernel LTS kernel 5.4.70. Which is fine. Again, it's based on Debian. So they typically use older packages, more stable packages like the older LTS kernel there. I'm kind of curious how many programs are actually installed on the system. So if you're on a Debian or a Boontube-based system, you could do sudo apt list space dash dash installed to get a list of all the programs installed on the system. And of course it'll spit that out. Of course it won't give you a count. So what you need to do is run that same command and then we're going to pipe sudo apt list dash dash installed. Pipe that into WC space dash L to get a line count. And it says warning apt does not have a stable CLI interface used with caution in scripts, but it still allowed me to run the command 1686. So 1686 packages installed on a Debian-based system. I would say that's about normal for, you know, full desktop environments with a reasonable suite of applications installed. One thing I'm kind of interested in is wallpapers. So let me right click on the desktop. I'm going to go to wallpaper and screensavers. The wallpaper utility, the changer is interesting because it's almost like wallpaper changers on like my Android phone, you know, where it has this kind of slideshow effect that appears and you just, you know, go through the slideshow and you just pick a wallpaper. And it's really neat. I will say the wallpaper pack is really nice. A lot of nature photographs, really nice clean photos though. Some abstract art stuff. I really like the bird there. What we got is some flying whales or something going on there. This particular, I've seen this wallpaper before. I don't know if this wallpaper pack has been available in earlier editions of Debian or if this is something brand new for 20.1. Some of these wallpapers though do look familiar to me. Now I am going to choose a light colored wallpaper because I think I want to change to a darker theme. So I'll go with something like that. And let's see if I can change the theme. So display settings. So display settings was what I was wanting to find to change the screen resolution earlier. And I searched for, I thought I'd search for display here before and nothing came up. Yeah, nothing comes up. But if you right click on the desktop and choose display settings, then you will get this screen here where you can actually set your screen resolution, screen brightness, refresh rate and all of that. The other things you can change from here in this little control center is you can add users. So it has this tab that says accounts. This is where you can add delete users to the system, Debian ID. I'm assuming that's some kind of cloud service for Debian. We have default applications. So what applications? What's your default browser? What's your default text editor? Things like that. Personalization. So the themes. Right now we're using a light theme. And this is what I was looking for, the dark theme. And close that out. Yeah, I really like the dark theme. Although if I'm such a dark theme, I really need a lighter wallpaper. Let's go much lighter for the wallpaper. I don't particularly like that wallpaper. That one's nice. Yeah. That has some really nice contrast. Really bright wallpaper against that dark theme. That really looks good. See what the file manager looks like with the dark theme. Yeah, the deep and desktop environment is really beautiful. Now one thing I will say with the deep and desktop environment, it actually looks better on physical hardware. Because remember, we are not using the fancy effects mode. We are using the normal mode because the fancy effects mode would even would spike the CPU and the VM to like 100%. I've done it before and I can actually log out and change it. Let me reboot the system and I will try to turn on the fancy effects mode. And actually I don't need to restart the computer or log out or anything actually right there from the control panel. If you go back into the display settings and if you go down to where we changed the theme. Personalization. I changed it to a dark theme. You see window effect. We had it turned off because we were in normal mode. If you just slide that on, that will change to the fancy effects mode. And that should get us now the transparency and the blurring effects. Yeah, that looks really nice. Again, I think I need a lighter wallpaper. I was trying to find a good balance of a light wallpaper, but not one that would just completely blind you guys that are watching the video. Yeah, that one right there looks good. Yeah, that's some really nice blurring. The panel is also blurred. I don't know if you guys can tell because it's a very similar background. And I think you can change the effects of the transparency if I get back in here and go to personalization. Yeah, transparency so we can make it even more transparent. Yeah, so it really bleeds through or we can make it less transparent. And you may want to adjust that depending on the kind of background you're using. I'm going to use 50% transparency. That's probably a good middle ground for most situations. I will say the deep end desktop environment is very intuitive. When you right click on the desktop, you find the things in this menu that you expect to find. You have the start menu, very reminiscent of something like Windows. It's got some quick launchers over here. It's got a search panel. By the way, the bar at the bottom, the panel, if you right click on it, you want to change location. I mean, you just right click on it and you choose location and say top and it goes to the top. It's really easy to adjust. Can I drag it? I'm not sure if I can drag it or not. Let's see. We can change it to the left-hand side of the screen. That might be interesting. You know what? I don't hate that, actually. Yeah, I could get used to that. Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on this. I'm going to go back to the previous ones. Somewhat of a minor release for Deepin, Deepin 20.1. Again, just keeping up with the minor point releases for the Debian 10 series. But overall, I do like Deepin. I know a lot of people try to trash Deepin. A lot of people really fear Deepin because it is a Chinese-based distribution. People fear Chinese companies because it's a corporate distribution. There's a company behind it. People fear Chinese corporations. People fear the Chinese government. There have been claims in the past, unfounded claims that Deepin contained a spyware, which was really overblown. Deepin has some web analytics. And people blew that story up and to Deepin was spyware. Deepin eventually got rid of that stuff because people were overblowing that story to the point it was causing Deepin some headaches. So they did get rid of some of the analytics. But for me, I trust it. I like it. It's Debian. It's stable. And it looks good. The desktop environment just looks good. It's probably when you think of the desktop environments out there available in Linux, they are doing the best job as far as trying to win over those Windows and Mac users. Because nobody's going to look at Genome and think, man, I really should leave Windows 10 for that. Nobody's going to think that. You show a Windows user the Deepin desktop environment and they're just going to be blown away. They're going to want to run Linux just because it's so sexy that desktop looks. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Devon Fran, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Akami, Arch 5530, Chris, Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Pick, BM, Scott, and Willie. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this installation and first look at Deepin 20.1. I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. This channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. I couldn't do what I do without you guys. If you'd like to support me, consider doing so. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.