Send Link mailing list submissions to
[email protected]
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
https://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
[email protected]
You can reach the person managing the list at
[email protected]
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Link digest..."
Today's Topics:
1. The rapidly advancing world of Chinese open source
(Stephen Loosley)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2024 21:33:01 +0930
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] The rapidly advancing world of Chinese open source
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn
from
A glimpse into the rapidly advancing world of Chinese open source
By Liam Proven? Fri 23 Aug
2024??https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/23/deepin_23/
After a couple of years in development, Linux Deepin 23 arrives, with some new
shiny that throws shade on the leading Western desktop distros.
Deepin 23 was finally released last week, nearly two years since we reported on
the preview.
Deepin is the free community sibling of Uniontech's UOS distribution, and as of
last November, the company claimed it had more than three million paying users.
As we said back then, there are about ten times as many CentOS and Fedora users
as there are RHEL customers ? and about five times as many users of
Debian-family distros as all the RHELatives put together ? so if the free:paid
user ratio in the People's Republic is anything like elsewhere, that implies
that Deepin is one of the world's most-used desktop distros.
[Photo caption: By default, Deepin resembles a brighter Windows 11: taskbar at
the bottom, centered icons, etc.]
We suspect that many users in the West will be too concerned about potential
Chinese government spyware hidden in the OS to run Deepin as their main OS. The
company does publish a lengthy privacy policy ? in English ? but one might well
worry that the Chinese government could overrule that if it wanted.
As such, this is more an overview than a deep dive.
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.
This release is still Debian-based, and conventional Debian-style apt commands
still work. In addition to this, Uniontech is working on its own cross-distro
and cross-architecture packaging system, formerly called Linglong [Chinese] but
now renamed Linyaps. There are a few new commands: linglong-repair-tool,
ll-box, ll-box-static, ll-cli, ll-installer, and llpkg. A few of the built-in
apps (Calendar, Browser, and Mail) are installed as Linyaps packages.
According to the Linyaps description, its packages are cross-platform. Since
Deepin is currently available for x86-64, Arm64, Loongson, and RISC-V,
multi-CPU binaries could be a significant win for the company.
[The email client auto-configures server settings and can pick up calendars and
address books too.]
As usual, it's a fantastic looking distro. The loading screen is the name
Deepin in dark blue, with a wave of lighter blue liquid gradually sloshing in
and filling the letters; finally, the tittle of the letter "i" pops off and
bounces back into place.
The desktop is colorful, with more than half a dozen choices of icon theme,
some retro-styled. There are multiple color palettes, wallpapers, and the
taskbar can be centered or left-aligned and placed on any screen edge. The only
thing missing from previous releases is the floating dock option, which Deepin
used to call "fashion" mode. Since KDE can now do this, perhaps it's too pass?
now.
The start menu pops up a floating box with a grid of app icons, which can be
maximized into a Windows 8-style fullscreen launcher, or sorted, either
alphabetically or by category. Although the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE)
has far fewer options to set than KDE Plasma 6, for instance, the options are
all in one place, not spread over three or four "alternative" launchers. On
Plasma, you have to try all the different plugins for launch menu, app
switcher, desktop handler, and so on, to see which you prefer. You may even
need to make notes ? it's that complicated.
In DDE, it's all in one place, which for us is far better execution and makes
it much easier to explore. As well as multiple status icons on the taskbar,
there's also a pop-out "quick settings" panel like that in GNOME or recent
versions of macOS.
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.
The installer now has a custom-installation option that can use existing
partitions. We tried it on one of The Reg FOSS desk's elderly test laptops,
alongside several other distros. Although it installed and tried to boot,
sharing a /home partition was too much for it and it never got to the GUI. Give
a whole PC over to it and we suspect it'll be fine. It also wasn't very happy
in VirtualBox, with some similar display corruption to that we saw in the
Qt-based Ubuntu remixes. In a QEMU-based hypervisor it ran perfectly smoothly.
[There are utilities for maintenance, such as this passable imitation of the
macOS Disk Utility.]
The ISO offers a live desktop mode, so you can try it out without installing,
or you can choose to boot directly into the installer, Debian or
openSUSE-style. It also offers the choice of kernel 6.6 or 6.9, and there's a
button in the setup program to install current Nvidia drivers.
There are several places where this Chinese OS doesn't work quite right outside
the country. The default timezone is Beijing, and although the installer offers
English, it's US-only ? there are no options for UK or other localizations.
(You can choose one post-install, though.) We couldn't get the built-in AI
assistant to work ? but then again we didn't want it. It's another indicator
that the pervasive trend of "everything is better with LLM bots" is worldwide
now.
The Deepin app store is full of Chinese apps labeled only in Chinese, but
familiar names such as Firefox and Chrome are there, along with an impressive
list of others. Uniontech offers its own IDE and Linyaps packaging tools too.
It seems serious about building a community and app ecosystem.
The Deepin Browser is Chromium-based, but uses the elderly Chromium 93 code
base, so installing a replacement browser might be prudent.
There are some amusing translations in places. We liked the estimated
installation time: "It takes about a few minutes."
The Linyaps tool describes apps as being isolated in "pagodas," which amused
us. The introductory video is only in Chinese as well. Even so, for a distro we
suspect few outside China would even consider, the localization is pretty good.
On home turf, Uniontech claims impressive levels of community involvement.
[It has dark mode, including automatic switching, and the Settings app includes
a friendly graphical updater.]
Over this release's protracted development period, Uniontech seems to have
backed away from some of its optimistic tech claims. Although the company said
it would build its own distro, there's still Debian under here. The
ChromeOS-style twin root partitions have gone (although the single one left is
still labeled roota). DDE's window manager is KDE's Kwin. Although some of the
betas offered Wayland as an option, it's gone from the final release, which
uses just X.org.
There's a lot to like here, and we feel that many of the better-known Linux
vendors in the Occident could learn a lot by studying Deepin. We especially
like the "Deepin Home" applet, right on the desktop, which offers
communications with the company and the user community, a bug reporter, a
suggestions box, a wiki, access to source code, a news page, and more. There's
also a manual right next to it.
To us, it looks like the world of Linux in China is advancing rather quicker
than elsewhere.
Yes, it builds on well-established tech from the West ? like the other big
Chinese distro, openKylin, which is built on Ubuntu. But Chinese Linux
companies are clearly trying new things and improving the fit and finish ? and
with a commendable focus on users, not on tools for servers and their
administrators.
You might not want to run a Chinese OS on your own PC, which is fair enough...
but take a look at how the other half of the Linux world lives. Their grass
really is greener, and our local vendors should be trying harder.
------------------------------
Subject: Digest Footer
_______________________________________________
Link mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
------------------------------
End of Link Digest, Vol 381, Issue 17
*************************************
