April 8th, 2019 at 12:05 AM
I've been using my MacBook Pro as my sole compute device for the past few years. It's an old model with a 1280x800 screen. Serves me very well indeed, but I do development on this thing. The screen is a mood killer, 110%.
Well, I had an old Lenovo G710 (2.5 ghz dual core haswell (4th gen) i5, 16 gigs of RAM, 240 gig SSD), and the thing is gigantic. 17 inches, 1600x900 display, and otherwise a terrible design. Horrible battery life, heavier than the most heavy gaming laptop, and gigantic in just about all regards.
Windows doesn't exactly boot on this thing, so I started finding some linux distributions. I settled with Deepin, very much by surprise. It's a Chinese linux distribution that isn't particularly popular here in America. From my past couple weeks of rumaging around reddit, it seems like very few people actually use it in the English-speaking community. This was almost a turnoff to me, but I decided to use it for a variety of reasons. I started off very skeptical, but let's just say the experience managed to change my mind.
Because it's based on Debian, I figured that if I needed to dig deep into the system, I could look up Debian tutorials and most likely find what I need. From a couple weeks of experience so far, it definitely appears like this is very much the case. It doesn't seem they refactored things too greatly under the hood. This was originally a concern for me, but I'll say this, if you're familiar with Debian (or Ubuntu even), you'll be fine here.
Overall, I'm very highly impressed. I *might* go back to Ubuntu once 19.04 comes out. (Even though Deepin's repositories seem to be much better, in Ubuntu, you do have snap packages and PPAs for unofficial distribution of software from vendors themselves. This is nice, because not even the best repositories always carry the latest versions of software that you'll need. ) But honestly, as surprised as I am, I've been using it a lot, and my experience has been nothing short of fantastic yet.
Anyone heard of this distribution? If you're a Linux user, what distro do you use?
Well, I had an old Lenovo G710 (2.5 ghz dual core haswell (4th gen) i5, 16 gigs of RAM, 240 gig SSD), and the thing is gigantic. 17 inches, 1600x900 display, and otherwise a terrible design. Horrible battery life, heavier than the most heavy gaming laptop, and gigantic in just about all regards.
Windows doesn't exactly boot on this thing, so I started finding some linux distributions. I settled with Deepin, very much by surprise. It's a Chinese linux distribution that isn't particularly popular here in America. From my past couple weeks of rumaging around reddit, it seems like very few people actually use it in the English-speaking community. This was almost a turnoff to me, but I decided to use it for a variety of reasons. I started off very skeptical, but let's just say the experience managed to change my mind.
- The d*** thing is stable as all hell. Even more stable than a fresh install of Mac OS on my Mac. I'm very pleasantly surprised by this. I have had absolutely ZERO issues whatsoever.
- It's extremely fast compared to Windows and Mac OS. Relatively good performance, even for a Linux distro.
- The desktop environment is a custom, in house desktop environment from the Deepin team. It is, by far, the most beautiful desktop environment I have ever used. Extremely functional, very well polished and very stable. It somewhat mimics Windows and Mac OS, and is somewhat of a fusion of the best elements of both.
- They included applications for things that often need to be done, such as installing fonts, finding graphics drivers, etc. Most distributions require you to go to a terminal for this. Deepin has it built in the box. These are small details, and are applications you don't think you'll need until you find that you actually do need them. They've actually come in handy for me. Saves me from being in the terminal too much.
- Despite being a small distribution, its packages and repositories are great. It's based on Debian, so just about anything that's compatible with Debian will work in Deepin. For better or for worse, Debian (and debian based distros) are well known to have some of the largest repositories available in the Linux community. It seems that Deepin gets most of its packages upstream and has an equally large selection. Considerably better than Ubuntu in that regard, interestingly.
- Surprisingly, you can install Unity (game engine), Pycharm, Chrome, and a ton of other applications straight from these repositories and the app store. I was shocked. In Ubuntu, this is only possible by going to the terminal and copy/pasting commands to add unofficial PPAs. These are only compatible with certain releases of Ubuntu, and can break your system if they are poorly maintained. I've never seen a linux distribution offer all of this out of the box in the repositories.
- It somewhat feels like Windows, and is every bit as easy to use. Overall, highly polished.
Because it's based on Debian, I figured that if I needed to dig deep into the system, I could look up Debian tutorials and most likely find what I need. From a couple weeks of experience so far, it definitely appears like this is very much the case. It doesn't seem they refactored things too greatly under the hood. This was originally a concern for me, but I'll say this, if you're familiar with Debian (or Ubuntu even), you'll be fine here.
Overall, I'm very highly impressed. I *might* go back to Ubuntu once 19.04 comes out. (Even though Deepin's repositories seem to be much better, in Ubuntu, you do have snap packages and PPAs for unofficial distribution of software from vendors themselves. This is nice, because not even the best repositories always carry the latest versions of software that you'll need. ) But honestly, as surprised as I am, I've been using it a lot, and my experience has been nothing short of fantastic yet.
Anyone heard of this distribution? If you're a Linux user, what distro do you use?
