Skip to main content

5 Reasons Why New Linux Users Will Love Deepin

5 Reasons Why New Linux Users Will Love Deepin

Technologically speaking, Ubuntu is a pretty good Linux distribution. But sometimes you might wish that the user experience in Ubuntu could be better. There are plenty of Ubuntu-based derivatives that try to solve this problem in their own ways, but one distribution that’s gaining some special attention is Deepin.
Interested? Here are five reasons why you should try Deepin, especially if you’re new to Linux.

Based On Ubuntu

First off, Deepin is based on Ubuntu, which provides many under-the-hood benefits. Since Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions are widely used across the Linux community, you’ll know that all packages are supported and updates are guaranteed (especially security updates). Additionally, any packages that you find online that are made for Ubuntu can be installed in Deepin without any worries at all. While Deepin might not be very popular, you can feel good using it.

Deepin’s Own Desktop Environment

deepin desktop   5 Reasons Why New Linux Users Will Love Deepin

One of the biggest benefits of using Deepin is that it doesn’t have the Unity desktop environment that Ubuntu uses. Instead, Deepin has its own desktop environment under the same name that provides an extremely simple, elegant design. The high amount of simplicity won’t be much of a turn-on for more experienced Linux users, but it’s perfect for beginners where less is more. Plus it looks good and is intuitive.
The desktop environment just has a dock along the bottom of the screen, which holds shortcuts for your favorite applications as well as indicators for things like network, sound, and battery.
For the nerds, you may like to know this desktop environment has been rewritten in HTML5 and Go languages, which makes it very modern and easy to manage.
Custom App Store

deepin app store   5 Reasons Why New Linux Users Will Love Deepin

Deepin also has its own custom app store, which in my opinion looks better than the Ubuntu App Store. You have a lot of categories on the left side; “Upgrade”, “Uninstall”, and “Installation” tabs along the top, and then a nice display of various featured applications.
Clicking on an application will fetch a description and screenshots. It’s easy to browse and install software with this, which is also important for new Linux users.

Custom System Settings

deepin system settings   5 Reasons Why New Linux Users Will Love Deepin

The custom system settings dialog in Deepin makes looking at system settings much less intimidating. Launching the system settings just displays a panel that appears from the right side of the screen. It will then display various categories, each of which will show simple and elegant configurable options. This is easily my most favorite system settings implementation, and it’ll be a joy to use for anyone.

Custom Installer

deepin custom installer   5 Reasons Why New Linux Users Will Love Deepin

In line with simplicity and elegance, the custom installer (which installs the distribution onto your hard drive) is perfect for new Linux users. All you have to do is type in a username, a name for the computer, your password, and then choose which hard drive you want Deepin to be installed on. That’s it — it’ll take care of the rest.
Of course, when you choose which hard drive to install to, there’s also an expert mode so that you can do a few other things such as specify where the bootloader should be installed and perform some partitioning. However, it defaults to simple mode so new Linux users won’t have to worry about all that.

Installation

Getting started is easy enough — just download the ISO image file, write it to a USB drive, and then configure your BIOS to boot from the USB drive rather than your normal hard drive. You’ll be trying out Deepin in a live environment where you can play around with it as much as you want and it won’t make any permanent changes to your computer.

Thoughts On Deepin

As you can see, Deepin is a very interesting Linux distribution to try out, especially if you haven’t tried out Linux before. It’ll be interesting to see how this distribution progresses, and I seriously hope that it gets more popular because it definitely has the potential to be huge. More people just need to know about it.

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a