Technology can sometimes go from east to west: Ubuntu DDE 21.10 remix ships in 22.01 The newest and quite possibly shiniest Ubuntu remix has kicked a new version out the door. Yes, yet another new desktop, but it's a sign of bigger things to come. Ubuntu DDE stands for Ubuntu Deepin Desktop Edition – in other words, a remix of Ubuntu but with the desktop environment of the Chinese Deepin distro. Deepin, …
For so many years have been hearing about the Chinese being about to mandate Linux on the Desktop but it never arrives. It would be the smart thing to do for them and would be awesome news. All desktop OS are decent enough to use now, just needs the traction to get developers to build their apps on Linux.
They have no need to mandate something that can't run what they need to run. It wouldn't be smart at all.
And or they rewrite all the desktop applications they need - but probably a lot are still Western ones it would take them a lot of years, money and effort to write, and as the recent news about wholly underfunded but critical FOSS applications and library shown, many developers still like to be paid for their work.
Those of us in the West who use Linux or BSD as our daily desk/laptop OS are able to find all the applications we need. almost always FOSS applications. The question, then, is not necessarily whether the applications exist but whether there are Chinese translations for their UIs. If they aren't available from the original projects the Chinese would be able to provide their own if only they had access to the code...
Distrowatch rankings are hit counters for its distro pages. They aren't claimed to be anything more. Apart from anything else the site's likely to be biased in favour of visitors with at least some fluency in reading English.
Like everyone else I've read these accounts of non-Western OSs being mandated; I'm curious as to how this works out in practice. We have commentards with geographically diverse experience. Surely someone has at least anecdotal information of what the reality is.
When it comes to desktop environments pedestrian and conservative are good. Their purpose is - or should be - to unobtrusively enable the user to run applications and open files. What the user doesn't need is a new, exciting and unfamiliar way of doing or failing to do this that then has to be fathomed out. A DE that makes for an impressive demo runs the risk of being the exact opposite of what the user needs.
But all these new DEs offer "discoverability" don't they? I don't want to spend today discovering how to do what I knew how to do yesterday.
I agree.
I do not spend much time interacting with the DE so it mostly needs to just work. The UI and behaviour of applications matters a great deal, but all I really care about the DE is 1) it displays info and controls I want and 2) I can launch and switch between applications easily.
I use XFCE which is very old fashioned - but it does everything I need.
I don’t think there is anything old fashioned about XFCE. If it isn’t broken….
I use i3 - similarly “old fashioned” - for the same reasons.
There are countless years of people’s lives invested in developing whizzy desktop widgets and other crap that nobody ever uses. The only purpose of such nonsense is to fill up your disk and slow down the machine. Sad really.
Deepin is not just a DDE it is very much an operating system in its own right and is a very sophisticated Linux version capable of running ANY DDE not just its own. Personally I am very much a fan of the DDE, perhaps less so of the Os which as others have noted is very Chinese indeed.
Having said which a little patience goes a long way towards giving you a very good system indeed. On a par with Mint, Manjaro or any other.
Or that the sold called "tax" for tuppence for 6 years of updated OS. Hardly a financial burden.
£20 for a license key, over 72 months.
27 pence per month is hardly something to complain about.
Even at full retail at £120, that's like £.130 a month.
Or about half a cup of Starbucks.
I installed it (i.e., UbuntuDDE Remix 21.10 Impish) and found the following funny:
I created an 18 character user password during the install process, and received the message "Password too long," which went away when I reduced it to 16 characters.
Mildly ironic:
After installation of the OS, the Control Center made it simple enough to find how to switch the system language from English to Chinese, however, how to instead select a Chinese language input method and keep the menus in English, was less obvious. I did find IBus Preferences with the launcher and was able to enable Chinese language pinyin input by following steps I have used on other Linux systems.
Buggy:
Pressing the minimize button on an app window did minimize the app down to the taskbar, but if the app was brought back up into view, clicking the minimize button no longer did anything (I could still minimize by clicking on the app's icon in the taskbar).
Unsmooth:
Trying to shutdown from the taskbar or launcher leads to a message about Unattended Upgrades Shutdown and forcing shutdown may cause data loss (even after the OS was updated and restarted and the Software Updater indicated that the software was up to date).
And, that's about it. Time to uninstall. I've been using KDE Neon as daily driver for more than a year, and other setups (Linux or otherwise) continue to impress less. I will note that getting the Chinese language input method setup on UbuntuDDE was easier than doing so on KDE Neon, however, I expected something way better. To analogize, before one gets to own a car that one likes a lot, rental cars can be exciting, but once you own a car you really like, a rental may be novel, but likely will be a letdown. Initial impression of UbuntuDDE felt like one of those unexceptional rentals (but I'm still glad that TheReg put it on my radar).
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