 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at the recently released Deepen 20.8, and Deepen has always been one of my favorite desktop Linux distributions because it's very modern, it's really attractive, it has its own custom desktop environment called the Deepen desktop environment or DDE, has its own custom suite of applications, and it's just a really well-polished, well-put-together Linux distribution. It has a company behind it, it has a large following, a large user base. Based out of China is the country of origin. This particular distribution, Deepen, is based on Debian. When this project got started several years back originally, they based off of Ubuntu, but I think around 2015 or so, they switched from basing off of Ubuntu to Debian, and that's always, again, been one of the distributions. I've always really enjoyed every time I've played with it. I have installed Deepen on physical hardware for friends and family, you know, sometimes they'll bring me a computer, especially if it's a computer that has pretty good specs, I'll throw Deepen on it. Well, and the reason it needs good specs is because Deepen was a lot of the graphics, fancy animations, and blurring effects, and it looks really good, but it does require a decent computer. It doesn't have to be anything just remarkable, but you probably don't want to install Deepen on your potato laptop. So I've downloaded the ISO for Deepen 20.8, and I'm going to go ahead and run through a quick installation inside a virtual machine. Do know that when you install Deepen inside a virtual machine, the installer for Deepen is their own installation program, their own installer. It requires that you have at least 64 gigs of disk space on a system before the installer will actually let you proceed through the installation. Now, it doesn't really install 64 gigs of stuff when you run through the Deepen installer, it installs far, far less than 64 gigs, but you do have to create a drive of 64 gigs or better in a VM for the installation to actually work. So just know that. So let's go ahead and launch into our live environment, which should launch us directly into the installation program. And we're launched immediately into the installation program. So this installer is rather simple to use. It's not very complicated. It's not the Ubuntu Ubiquiti installer. It's not the Calamari installer. It's the own custom installer, but I find it rather simple to use. At first, you have to select a language by default. It defaults to Chinese, but of course, I need English. So I'm going to choose English. Let me move my head out of the way, because I have read and agreed to the end user license agreement and their privacy policy. You have to tick that on. So there is a EULA. So just be aware of that. I know, especially those of us in the Freedom of the Source software community, we kind of fear in user license agreements, EULAs, but I'm going to tick it on and I'm going to click next. And then we get a friendly note, letting us know we're installing this inside a virtual machine and virtual machines. The performance may be suboptimal. And this is important. If you're doing this in a virtual machine, make sure you select a good video driver in my virtual machines. I typically use the VIRT IO graphics driver that typically gives me the best performance in these situations. And even then you may want to go ahead and once you install Deepin, turn off all the fancy blurring and animations just to speed things up a little bit in your virtual machine. So again, we've read the friendly note. Let's click next. Now the disk, I'm going to do full disk and I'm going to select slash dev slash VDA. It's the only disk here on the system. So I've got that. And you can see the partition scheme it's going to create. And this is really why it needs 64 gigs of space at a minimum is because it does this fancy partition scheme. You can see it's going to create slash boot slash data, the root partition slash recoveries root B and then a swap partition as well. So all of that I'm just going to leave as is I'm going to do encrypt this disk just to see if encryption works. And then I'm going to click next. And then you can see encrypt this disk, we need to create an encryption password. So I'm going to create a strong and complicated password for the disk encryption. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then I'm going to confirm. And this is a really neat portion of the installer ready to install make a backup of your important data. So there's nothing to back up here. This was just a fresh VM I just created. There's no data to backup. But if you wanted to you can see it's ticked on by default create a backup for system restore. But this will increase the time so it'll you know increase the installation time. I'm going to tick that off for purposes of this VM. There's no reason for me to do that inside the VM. Then I'm going to click next. And it looks like it's partitioning the drive. And now it's decompressing the files. So now it's actually running through the installation. I'm going to pause the recording. This portion of the install are typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my machine. And the installation has completed that took about five minutes or so. And now we click the button that says reboot. Now that's what I'm going to do. And now we come to the screen with the little lock icon here. And what this is of course the disk is encrypted right. So we have to enter our encryption password. So hopefully remember that strong and complicated password. So we log directly into an installation program again but it's different now we've got different options to go through. So we've already installed everything. This is just some of the post installation setup we've got to run through. So it defaults to English because we chose English before. So that's nice that it remembers that it also defaults to I've already read the end user license agreement. So I don't have to do all of that again. So I'm just going to click next keyboard layout English US has been chosen for me that is correct. I'm just going to click next select a time zone. Let's see if I can just click somewhere in the US Chicago Chicago is in the central US time zone. That is where I'm at not in Chicago but in the central time zone. So I'm just going to click next on that create an account. So I'm going to call my user DT. Now the host name for the computer it defaults to DT-PC. I'm going to change that to DT-vert just so I know this is a virtual machine if I ever SSH into it or something. Then let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password. And now let's go ahead and click next and it says our username must be between three and thirty two characters. So DT is not a good username. So I'll do Derek in this case. And now it allows me to continue. It says tuning the system please wait. All right. And we come to our login manager login prompt here. So let's go ahead and enter Derek's strong and complicated password. And then a friendly reminder we're in a virtual machine you know performance may not be that great yada yada yada. So do we want the effects mode with the fancy blurring and animations or do we want normal mode. I'm going to choose the effects mode with all the fancy effects just to see if it works with the graphics drivers here in the VM. If for some reason it's a little flaky or buggy I'll come back and do normal mode turning off all the animations. But let's try it with all the fancy effects at first. All right. And we're in our desktop environment we get a little welcome screen here before I go through anything else though. I'm going to go into the file system here or in the menu system here. I'm going to search for display because we need a different resolution. Let's see resolution. No how about monitors. How do I change I don't know system. How about settings. I don't know what I'm searching for here but there's got to be a way for me. There is the settings control centers what they call it. So we do have to go into the control center into display and the resolution defaults to 1280 by 800 but really I want a more appropriate 1920 by 1080 and then save that and this virtual machine should remember that I always want to be 1920 by 1080 and out of the box you can see why I love deep end as far as for aesthetics just the attractiveness of it. Beautiful wallpaper right. I'm beautiful panel at the bottom with a little blurring effect. It almost looks like a kind of like a glass effect going on. You can see the menu system right now we're using a light theme but you can see it's got some Gaussian blurring going on right. So it's like the picture kind of comes through but not quite. It's really a very nice effect. Let me go ahead and click next on the welcome screen here and of course do we want to do fashion mode or efficient mode. Fashion mode is what we're in by default. It's the panel at the bottom but it's not butted up against the bottom of the screen right. You got some padding. You got the rounded corners and that is a fresh modern kind of look but I gotta admit I'm an old school traditional kind of person. I want efficient mode which is the panel no padding around it because honestly that padding around is just kind of wasted space. Make the whole thing 100% wide and put it right up against the bottom of the screen. That's what I like. So I'm going to click next. Once again it's asking us do we want effects mode with the blurring and animations and everything or do we want normal mode turning all of that stuff off. I'm going to leave the effects on for now choose an icon theme by default it defaults to bloom. I guess there's some other options we could choose. I'm just going to go with the default icon set for now. I'm going to click done reading the release announcement for Deepin 20.8. They're really touting a program of theirs called Deepin Home. I'm assuming this is some kind of like a welcome application or a help application. Let's see what it is. It is a very attractive looking application. It almost is like a software center but it's not really for software right. You've got communication so I'm assuming clicking here would get us to a web form or IRC chat or something to communicate with the Deepin development team. You've got a ways to file bug reports suggestions which is coming. Both the bug report and suggestions are not active just yet. You got links to questionnaires to their wiki to their github. Get internal testing community news. This is a really nice kind of idea. This is not something you see in most Linux applications. Most of them have some kind of welcome application to get you some documentation and some help information but I really like the way they've done this here and they're trying to make it a lot more easy especially being able to quickly just click on a bug report button and away you go. That's going to be really nice once they get that up and running. Let me click on communication just to see what happens. I'm assuming a browser will open. Yeah the Deepin browser it's their own custom browser right and it opens to yeah so they've got some kind of a web form here where you can communicate with the Deepin team so that's nice if you need to get support. Let me close out the home application. Another application they've spent some time working on was their app store which their app store has always been a really nice attractive application store software center if you will and now they've really put some time working on some of the finer details as far as like progress bars when things are installing and updating and things like that but you can see it's a very attractive little application. Let's go ahead and try to install something just to see how this works. I don't know if htop is installed in Deepin out of the box but let's search for it. So you get the loading animation here and htop is not installed because you can see we have an install button. If it was installed we'd have a remove button. Let's click install and we didn't even have to use our sudo password right. Typically to install and remove software you have to use sudo. That's what you would have to do at the terminal but I guess with the graphical software center here they've removed the need to actually invoke sudo for this so that's actually kind of a nice touch. I don't mind that actually and you can see we get a notification saying htop was installed and they even put a desktop icon for htop. So that is especially for Windows users that's a really nice touch. Now for me I don't like icons on the desktop so I just you know highlight them and hit the delete key to get rid of those desktop icons. Htop's still installed right. If I go through the menu system I could search for htop it is there. I just don't want the icons on the desktop so yeah I really like that app store. Just quickly taking a look at some of their other custom applications. Their file manager it's actually a pretty nice file manager. I really like the disk section where you can see how much disk space you're taking up on various partitioning. You can see I've got a dvd drive attached to this virtual machine and of course the icon set which again the bloom icon set I believe is what they're calling this default icon set is really nice. Let me right click. Can I display hidden icons? I probably have to go in some kind of settings menu here. I do like the list look. So you've got this side panel that'll open up. What is that details for yeah this is really really cool. I was looking for a way to show hidden files. I know the key binding to hit in most file managers is control H. So if I do control H it'll show hidden files. I thought there'd be a graphical way to turn that on. I'm sure there is. I just probably settings here. Yeah settings. Let me go into settings hidden files yeah so there's the graphical way to go about that. So I'm going to go back into the settings and I'm going to go to theme and it says system theme. So whatever the system theme is is what it should default to. Let me leave all manager open. I'm going to go into the control center and see if this works. This was a little flaky before as far as applications respecting the theming. So where is the theming? Is it under display display personalization is what I should use. All right and then we have light auto and dark now I prefer dark. So yeah and the file manager respects that accent colors it defaults to this blue accent color which is fine and we get that green wallpaper though probably better with like a green accent. That's a little too bright maybe tone it down just a little bit. Yeah that's not bad or you know maybe something like an orange accent. That actually works really nicely too. I'm going to go back to this light green color there. So yeah let's see if all of the custom deepen apps respect the dark theme with the browser also be dark. Yeah we get a dark panel here at the top by the way let's see what the browser is. If I go to about browser you can see it's a chromium based browser it's this is version 6.0.24 and the name of the browser oddly enough is called browser. So this always kind of confuses me the generic names I don't like it when Genome does their applications with generic names and deepen does the same things with their applications just calling their web browser browser kind of an odd choice right but hey I understand they're trying to dumb it down for the masses you know because not everybody's going to know you know like Firefox is a browser you know LibreWolf is a browser whatever it happens to be right just calling your browser browser makes it obvious especially for the really new user hey that's the browser. Some other applications they have pinned to the taskbar here is Album which of course is your photo manager here I don't have any photos in this virtual machine to take a look at we do have a music player the music player is really almost iTunes like I don't have any music here as well to actually do anything with but we do have a nice little audio player if you want to play around with it on physical hardware where you forget something to actually listen to they have a calendar application which is pretty straightforward you know not much to see here it's like any other kind of calendar application you can search your events you know so you've got events and you can sort them with work life or you know any other category that you want to create here and I just noticed opening some of these applications some of them when I closed them they didn't actually close they were minimized to the system tray over here for example I still have the music application open so it just minimizes it to the tray here and just clicking on it unminimizes it minimizes it again so that's kind of cool so to actually quit out of it all together um probably we need to quit exit okay and now yeah it's no longer in the sys tray so just be aware of that so you don't have some applications running that you really don't want running for example this uh home screen right the deep and home program didn't actually kill itself when I closed out of it right it just minimized to the sys tray so let me actually exit out of home by the way this program does not look like it respects the dark theme so that's something to be aware of I'm it's a brand new program though there's a lot of work that deep and still has to do on that home application now let me go into the menu system here and before I go into the menu system actually let me right click on the menu because you can change the mode from fashion mode to efficient mode if you want to by right clicking on the menu you can also change the location so if you wanted the top panel you know you could move it to the top for me though I actually much prefer my panels to be on the bottom I right click on the launcher again status keep shown keep hidden or smart hide smart hide is nice if you want your full screen applications to push the the panel out of the way so if I do smart hide and I do a browser which should open full screen you see the panel goes away but it comes back when I put the cursor down there that is actually a really nice effect so let me go into the menu system here and we've got this button here so this is like a maximize button for your menu system what does that do well it toggles on your standard like full screen dashboard like you would get in something like uh Ganon for example or the old unity desktop or even kde plasma has these fancy full screen menus now if you want to use them so you have this as an option or if you un-maximize you get the traditional kind of menu system I prefer the traditional menu system again I'm more of a traditionalist can you separate by categories so we have a computer here and then we have documents so this is actually your file manager quick launchers so that is actually kind of nice so you can quickly access certain file manager bookmarks right here from the menu system as well so if I go into all categories here and you can see now we get it broken down by category so the first screen I guess it's like favorite applications or pinned applications we have an internet category we've already seen the browser there's also a mail program which is called mail that's all it's called and then of course our uh downloader or I guess a download manager and then you have to click back to go back the music application is the only thing in the music category so there's not too much here it's mainly just the custom deepen applications and not much else there's a movie program here let's launch that looks like a standard movie player right this is deepen movie 5.10.17 and it does respect the uh dark theme that we set going back into the categories under graphics we have our image viewer our photo manager we've already seen they also install simple scan which is a scanning utility that's not something most people these days have a need for I actually still have a printer with a scanner so I actually do install a simple scan on all of my installation so that's a nice touch for those that still need it there's a games category that has just a couple of games here and then office we have the library office suite we have base calc impress math and writer we also have our plain text editor let's see what they're using here so if I go to about this is deepen text editor 5.10.39 I really haven't played with their plain text editor much but I'm sure it's like any other plain text editor one other thing I want to look at in the menu system let me go to the system category and we've seen the file manager in the app store there is uh the terminal but I wasn't looking for their terminal well we should take a look at the terminal because this is the deepen terminal and it's actually pretty nice I have played around with this in the past it's a very full feature terminal emulator and you can customize it as far as the theming and you know the looks and everything it's got tabbing you can see you can get tabs as well really nice terminal emulator but what I was looking for under the system category was their system monitor so this would be their graphical system monitor which again like everything with deepens custom suite of applications it's really attractive and it's really a gorgeous program right now in cpu usage is quite high we're using about nine percent seventeen percent it fluctuates between about ten and twenty percent that's a lot of cpu again we're we have the fancy animations and blurring and everything going on so you know you get cool animations when you minimize and maximize and all of that so that does suck up some cpu the blurring especially that fancy Gaussian blurring that's going on that is really a cpu intensive kind of thing that's why a lot of desktop environments don't do that and again it's one of the reasons why you wouldn't want to install deepen again on a potato machine you know you want something recently made right something made I'd say in the last five or six years should run deep and just fine as far as ram usage I gave this vm 6 gigs of ram it's using 1.6 gigs of ram that might be a little heavier than normal because of some of the programs I've opened up I've probably got some background processes still running I probably should actually run htop to check some of this it says htop command not found well I installed htop and it's right there yeah when I run htop from the menu system it actually runs it just fine and you can see when I run htop I get a different amount of ram I get 1.3 gigs instead of 1.6 gigs that's what I expected because the graphical system monitor also sucks up a little bit of ram so for your your best readings just use a terminal program like htop to actually check the memory usage now I close the terminal I want to check does control alt t bring up a terminal because that's a key binding I expect on most Linux distributions to actually work it does so control alt t does bring up a terminal see if I can zoom in so yes uh control plus uh zooms in control minus would zoom back out what I want to do is I want to do a uname dash or let's check the kernel version this is 5.15.77 one other thing I would like to do is I'm going to do a apt list dash dash installed I believe is the command to get a list of everything installed via the apt package manager now I'm going to up arrow and I'm going to pipe that output into wc the word count program space dash l for a line count because I want a line count not a word count 1,775 lines were in that output meaning there was 1,775 packages installed via the apt package manager one thing to know with deepen is uh snap is not here if I do where is snap d you can see it's not installed if I do where is flat pack flat pack also is not installed and I know in past versions of deepen there were some issues with both snaps and flat packs sometimes you can run into some bugs trying to use those particular package formats I believe they've worked out some of the bugs with flat packet should work these days and I believe snaps work as well although I haven't tested it myself of course one way around all of that is to use app images which app images should work on pretty much any GNU slash Linux distribution now I'm going to right click on the desktop I'm going to go to wallpapers and screensavers because we get this almost mobile phone like wallpaper switcher which is kind of a neat idea and the wallpapers for deepen are gorgeous most of these I've seen before I've seen that one in a previous version of deepen I've seen that one seen yeah most of these have been around the block a few times with deepen I'm just going to go back to the default wallpaper which I think is rather nice so that's just a quick look at the recently released deepen 20.8 really fantastic distribution that it's been around for a number of years and every time I take a look at it it gets better and they really put a lot of work in on this if I'm I'm going to link to the release announcement for this you can see they put a lot of work as far as bug fixes on a lot of applications and things so again it's a good distribution I think it's one of the best distributions to put in front of people that are not familiar with Linux especially like Windows users Mac users you know they're wondering why they should switch to something like Linux Linux that's isn't that a server operating system you can't possibly use it on the desktop is it going to look good right well show them deepen and when they see deepen they're not going to want to run Windows or Mac anymore they're going to want to run this now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Gabe James Matt Maxim Minut Mitchell Paul West Waya Ball homie Alex Harmer Dragon Chuck commander angry Diokai George Lee Marstrum Nader Yon Alexander Paul peace arch and bed or polytech realities for a lesser at profit Roland Steven tools Devlin Willie these guys they're my high-steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched would not have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to support me subscribe to distro tube over on patreon peace but dt it's Chinese you can't trust it it's free and open source software guys