Deepin 15.10 Review – Auto Desktop folders, slideshow, better search…

Deepin, the chinese distro which brought the excellent Deepin DE to the world, has been updated to version 15.10. It comes with a few welcome enhancements, let’s take a tour of what’s new !

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The Desktop
The window manager has been modified in the stable version of Deepin. Named DDE-Kwin, it is supposed to use less RAM. I must say I didn’t see a big difference between 15.10 and 15.9 when I reviewed it, since the window manager already was pretty smooth in previous versions.

Deepjn 15.10 also comes with a new feature: the ability to automatically group files on the desktop by type. While Apple creates stacks, Deepin creates folders for Video, Audio, Documents, Pictures, Applications, and a grab-bag “Others” category. Users who like having files on the desktop will probably enjoy this, and while that’s not my case, it will at least enable a less messy experience.

15.10 also adds the possibility to set a slideshow of pictures as your wallpaper, with the ability to set a specific interval.

Finally, Deepin added a few dedicated switches to turn on or off specific audio effects. This is very welcome indeed, since Deepin has an annoying boot up sound, in my opinion, and this can finally be turned off easily, right from the settings.

Apart from these tweaks, Deepin DE stays pretty much the same, with a very simple interface based on a dock or a bottom panel, specific Deepin applications which range from nice and useful, like the file manager, to very limited, like the calendar, and a beautiful settings panel which comes from the right of the screen, much like Budgie’s Raven notification and quick settings panel.

The Deepin DE is a great desktop environment, and if you don’t want to use Deepin for any specific reason, you can still install it on a few other distributions to try it out.

Under the hood
Deepin 15.10 is ow considered a “stable” version, based on Debian Stable. Previous Deepin versions were using the debian unstable repositories. While this means that the system will benefit from a solid base, it also means that application versions will keep lagging behind other desktop distros. While Deepin relies on many of its own apps, some of them are pretty limited, and this means you won’t be able to replace them with newer, more up to date Linux applications.

Deepin 15.10 still has the same problem it ever had: its app store is heavily curated by the Deepin team, but these applications often are older releases. Firefox, for example, is still at version 60 while the latest one is 66.

This is further aggravated by the fact that Deepin does not support flatpak or snap by default. This would have been a good way to bypass these outdated software versions, but you’ll need to install Flatpak manually, and the Deepin Store does not support installing them, so you’re stuck with the command line.

Bug Fixes and minor improvements
A lot of bugfixes and minor improvements also have been applied to the various Deepin apps and desktop, with a lot of work on supporting display rotation and multiple display setups.
The dock also has been improved upon, with the possibility to disable the trash plugin, and an added option to hibernate directly from the power button.

The file manager can now use advanced search, with a lot more filters to find a specific file, and its adress bar has been redesigned to enable easier dragging of the window. It’s also now possible to copy the file path, and edit it, from the contextual menu.

The Deepin text editor now displays the number of characters in the status bar.

Performance wise, it seemed about the same as before, with no notable improvements to an relatively slight desktop environment. On my machine, it uses about 1.5Gb of RAM, out of 16Gb. I know some other desktops can be lighter, but Deepin DE has a bit more bling, so it’s a trade off many people will be willing to make.

All in all, Deepin 15.10 is a small iteration on the distribution, but existing users will probably want the upgrade, to fix some bugs and enable these new features and improvements. For those of you who don’t want to install Deepin (and there are quite a lof of people who are afraid of anything coming out of China), but still want to use their apps and DE, the updates should arrive shortly in your distro of choice, depending on how they package and release these kind of updates.