If any KDE developers read this, we seriously and strongly recommend that the KDE team takes a long, close look at Deepin. DDE shows both how pretty and how functional a Windows-style desktop can be, without needing Plasma’s multiple overlapping options. This is what we’d hoped to see in Plasma 6, but didn’t get. It’s probably fair to say that Deepin is the most sophisticated implementation of a Windows-like interface on any OS these days. It’s considerably more flexible and configurable than Windows 11 itself, and it makes Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, and the others look clunky and old-fashioned. Don’t get us wrong; this grumpy old vulture is happier with the relatively austere and Spartan Xfce, but for those who want something that’s shinier out of the box, DDE shows how it ought to be done. Even Microsoft could learn from the Chinese developers.

Linux Deepin 23

What even is a “Linux Deepin”? Seems like the editor never interacted with GNU+Linux before.

[…] [D]esktops could learn from [distro].

🤡

The dual root partitions we described in Deepin 20.5 are gone, but version 23 still sets up a moderately complex partitioning scheme, including an EFI system partition, a 1.5 GB /boot partition, a swap partition, and a 15 GB root partition, and the rest of the disk given to a partition labeled _dde_data. All are in plain old ext4 format, but there’s some magic being done with the data partition that we didn’t have time to trace. It appears to be mounted at multiple places, including /home, /var, /opt, and a mount point called /persistent beneath them all. We’re not sure exactly how it’s been done, but the distro has some kind of atomic installation facility with rollback.

Lack of proper documentation by Deepins Devs is enough of a red flag for me to never consider trying it.