Deepin 23: a beautiful, really disappointing update

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Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
00:42 Sponsor: TuxCare
01:56 Initial Setup
04:13 Deepin Desktop: Unchanged?
10:17 AI Features: big miss
14:24 Linyapps: is this just a Flatpak fork?
16:53 Parting Thoughts
20:01 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
20:45 Support the channel


Deepin is clearly looking more at Windows than macOS nowadays, with the taskbar at the bottom, and both styles you can pick from being basically Windows 10 or Windows 11.

The main menu is alright, with app search, the ability to sort applications by name, or freely by drag and drop in the list of apps, and a frequent and recently installed section.

I quite liked the Quick Actions module at the bottom right of the task bar, it's a very smartphone like interface, but practical.

In terms of personalization, you have the usual suspects, dark and light mode, accent colors, some form of global theme that changes accent colors, wallpapers and icons, or you can just change the icons and cursors individually, and the fonts. It's definitely no KDE or no Cinnamon here, and these theme changes don't apply uniformly to other apps.


Default apps are still in that same ballpark of being basic and simple, but being barely enough for anyone who just needs a computer for office work, email, and web browsing. It's all fine, but it hasn't progressed much since the last time I used Deepin.

Finally, Deepin is still stuck on X11. The betas talked about having experimental Wayland support, they couldn't ship with it in the end, and it's not there yet.

Finally, you have access to cross device sharing your clipboard to another computer, transfering files to other computers, or sharing the mouse cursor, unfortunately, that only works between computers running Deepin, or between Deepin and Windows.

Now, what sets Deepin apart from other distros and desktops, is its integration of AI features. First, is what they call UOS AI, its icon is present by default in the system tray, and it's basically just a gateway for you to have the various AI tools you use inside your OS: it doesn't come with its own model or anything, you need to enter an API key for any of the supported models, like GPT 3.5, GPT 4, and a few others that only have Chinese names that I can't read.

Deepin also includes the ability to build your own personal knowledge assistant, but it depends on the same models you have to configure.

And unfortunately, this is also true for the last feature is the Deepin System Assistant, an AI powered tool that lets you ask questions about how your system works. It's fine to try and simplify access to AI tools by giving users a single interface to let them access various types of assistants, but if you also expect users to actually generate API keys and enter them here, then it means your implementation of AI is not ready for prime time, and so your implementation at the OS level is not that useful, because anyone who knows how to generate a key and use it, and fix the errors, they have a paid account, and thy don't need your watered down interface.

Another thing introduced in Deepin 23 is what they call Linyaps, this is a new packaging format that Deepin created, and they started using that format for some of their own applications. It's another sandboxed format like Snaps or Flatpaks, where you build your app once for each architecture, and you don't need to build it for each distro and each distro's version. They have their own section in the App Store, with a bunch iof apps already, although most of these seem t be chinese apps that have untranslated names.