Deepin Linux 15.2 Review – A Polished Chinese Made Linux Distro

Deepin Linux is a Chinese-made Linux distribution that caters for the average desktop user. It’s very easy to use. Like Ubuntu, it’s based on Debian unstable branch.

Installing Deepin Linux 15.2

First you need to download the Deepin ISO image which can be found on the official website.

Once downloaded, it’s time to create a live USB. The startup disk application in Ubuntu, however, didn’t recognize the Deepin ISO image. So I resorted to the good old dd utility and it successfully created the live USB for me. You can also install the graphical Deepin boot maker on Ubuntu and use it to create the live USB.

The installation is dead simple. Reboot your computer from the live USB. Then create a user account in Deepin installer and select the hard drive partition that you want to use for Deepin. Click install and wait for a few minutes. It can be installed without Internet connection.

If you like to install Deepin alongside existing Linux distribution, then it’s better to create a separate partition with Gparted in the existing Linux distribution for Deepin instead of creating it at installation time. After the installation, you need to reboot your computer into your previous Linux distro and update the Grub boot menu so that Deepin can be found in the boot menu.

On Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Deb based Linux distro, run the following command to update Grub boot menu

sudo update-grub

On Fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Manjaro etc, you need to run one of the following two command:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

After that, reboot your computer and you should find Deepin in Grub boot menu.

Things to Do After Installing Deepin Linux

It comes preloaded with some nice third-party applications like Spotify music player, crossover, WPS office suite, Google Chrome, Skype, Steam etc. Now here’s what you might need to do after installing it.

Update and Install Software

The first thing that I do after installing a Linux distro is always updating software to the latest version. It’s very easy to do, simply open up a terminal window by pressing CTRL+ALT+T, and run the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

There are about 674MB of packages that can be upgraded. If you live outside China, which is very possible since you are reading an English blog now, you are likely to find that downloading speed from software repository is slow because of the fact that the default software repository is located in China.

To change your software source, click the gear icon in the Dock to open control center.

then select system, click the gear icon in the update bar. Click switch button to select the nearest mirror.

Adjust Time and Date

Deepin Linux set UTC as the default time zone. To adjust the time zone, click the gear icon in the Dock to open control center, then select date and time. And add your time zone.

The Deepin Store

The Deepin App store is where Deepin Linux really outshines other Linux distributions. You can find tons of useful applications in the App store, Pretty much every known Linux desktop application you can think of, whether it’s open source or not, can be found and easily installed from the Deepin store. You don’t need to worry about dependency problem. All you need to do is click the install button and it will install it for you. It’s that simple.

Deepin Linux also make an effort to bring web applications to the desktop. Applications that begins with Web in its name indicate that they are web applications such as Web Google Drive.

Cons

• It is not very customizable.
• The default font rendering in Web browser looks bad, although it can be improved by installing infinality.
• Not-so-nice translation
• It’s a little bit heavy on resources. Issuing htop command in the terminal tells me that it used up 659MB of RAM after it finished booting up with no applications opened.

Is It Stable?

Google Chrome is the default web browser. It had minor issues when I tried to upload images to website. I had to select my files twice in order to upload. After I installed the latest stable version from official Google repository, the issue was resolved. Firefox had no problem at all when uploading files. The DMovie application, which is the default video player on Deepin, crashed one time when playing MP4 file. Other than that, I can say Deepin Linux is pretty stable as your daily driver.

Overall, Deepin Linux is a great distro for Linux beginners and for those who don’t want to mess around with the underlying system. It’s very easy to use and very user-friendly. Installing software is a breeze.  It currently ranks #14 on DistroWatch with 685 hits per day. I would recommend Deepin Linux over Ubuntu to my Windows friends if they are interested in switching to Linux.

And that’s my review of Deepin Linux 15.2. As always, if you found this post useful, then subscribe to our free newsletter or follow us on Google+, Twitter or like our Facebook page. Thanks for visiting!