I find it baffling that a website who's sole purpose is to present "the most beautiful desktop environment" would present low resolution, reduced color screenshots to back the claim.
There are better screenshots behind the "Digital Assets" nav link, but I wouldn't have found that, or thought to look there for screenshots if I wasn't concerned about replies to this comment proving me wrong.
That’s a surprisingly wholesome community! Friendly/welcoming folks, and they take their creativity seriously enough to put work into it and critique it.
It's 2020. Does the Mac OS allow the user to change the menu bar's color? I was forced to use a MacBook Air for work a couple of years ago and was shocked to find that I was forced to use the drab, grey color that was obviously borrowed from the 1970s Unixes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX, for example) via NeXTSTEP.
I cannot imagine why you would find the joy of configurability an "asinine dick swinging contest". I find /r/unixporn unpretentious and wholesome. I find most posts there done out of sheer joy and pride. No one is selling anything or shilling anything.
It could be described as a "asinine dick swinging contest" because in their battle for DE domination they are all hurting the overarching "linux desktop" community by making sure that every developer would have to support many DE, window managers, distro's and what not to get a reliable app.
Having one DE emerge as victorious would greatly benefit linux desktops as a whole, even if it would kill customizability.
It’s one thing to want a customizable dock... but you throw the baby out with the bath water when you abandon MacOS entirely because of it. I understand the dock is just one example, I’m sure you have many.
(You’ve always been able to change the settings of the Dock, it’s just not in Apple’s UI. In older times you could replace PNG assets yourself. Modern stuff is vector based but can still be tweaked. Remember iconfactory?!)
If it brings you joy to tinker with your DE to that extent by all means go for it and have fun. Personally, I like to tinker with my toys and like to get shit done with my professional tools. My Mac is a professional tool.
I’m one of them and we do. Why do you think we wouldn’t? They’re not lacking any capability, and we generally create them because they’re more efficient for our workflows.
My magicbook came with deepin linux installed, but unfortunately they're based off debian stable, which meant that most of the packages were severely outdated and unusable for me as a dev environment.
The deepin desktop environment itself was pretty, but janky. The settings thing (on the right side of the screen) is difficult and unintuitive to navigate, and scrolling was still buggy when I used it in December (it will randomly skip sections or just get stuck when you scroll). The other apps felt similarly unpolished, like they'd put all their energy into the look rather than the boring stability side of things. In a few years it might be a nice DE, but it has a long way to go.
I've tried all of the major desktops over the past year in anticipation of 20.04, but I think I'll be moving to KDE once it comes out. It seems to have the most seamless integration of them all, and still allows me to control things. I just hope the performance is good.
Debian stable (buster currently) is my daily driver. I'm quite happy that I have stable targets of packages to develop against. I'm curious about the type of work you do that Debian packages are "outdated" and do not enable you to continue your work.
I've used many different distros but I keep coming back to rock-solid Debian.
I guess front-end development is the obvious one. The Node.js version on Debian Buster is 10.15.2~dfsg-2, while you have 12.16.2 on the official NodeJS website.
To be fair, OP mentioned that the official packages were often useless, not the distribution as a whole (you can often install custom packages / binaries, although it's not nice).
I've faced many issues with Debian a few years ago regarding the old packages, one of them was building stubby from source which required getdns 1.1.2 at least, no luck the one in the repository didn't satisfy the version requirement, I tried to build getdns from source but faced an issue with the too old GCC version, I had to "frankeindebian" with gcc and g++ from debian unstable repository. I then decided to switch to Fedora. Don't get me wrong, stability is good, especially when you have to deal with Nvidia. Fun fact: I tried to install CUDA on Fedora 31 Workstation but faced an issue with a too recent version of GCC, it really depends on the use cases.
I've felt like the gap became smaller, either stuff isn't changing so fast anymore, or I just got lucky and only dealt with things that had good backwards compatibility.
Either way I'm usually always switching to testing about half a year before it becomes stable. It usually already is pretty stable at that point, and if I do encounter an issue I like to report it to give a little bit back, to help make the next stable release a little more stable from the start. :-)
I do wonder if it’s legally acceptable to use the name “Ubuntu” as part of a different commercial product’s name - especially after acknowledging on the front page that the name “Ubuntu” has been trademarked by Canonical.
Certainly, section 4 of Canonical’s Intellectual Property Rights Policy [0] permits such use only if Canonical were to provide written permission to do so.
I presume they want to use the name until a take down notice arrives from Canonical and benefit from the brand till that time?
Give that Deepin are a company, I would expect their legal team to either prevent such misuse or to ensure that the written permission is stated on the front page.
What's the point of creating a new "distro" that just has a different window manager/desktop environment? Like, what kind of person would spend time doing that? Maybe that's a little harsh, but these kinds of projects seem completely pointless. Changing your wm/de doesn't take more than a couple minutes (including the download time). It might actually be harmful, the world doesn't need more distros, derivative or otherwise.
This is a remix, not a distribution. Nothing more than Ubuntu with a pre-installed desktop environment. Remixes give users the same benefits installing yourself provide. But they do so while keeping the oobe that makes distros like Ubuntu intuitive and competitive.
I do agree the Linux distro ecosystem is a scattered mess. And that negative diversity of incompatible package managers and display systems goes against the standardizations that made POSIX dominant to begin with.
When I look at Elementary"OS", I see a branding built on the foundation of what could simply be Ubuntu Pantheon Remix.
The idea that these hundreds of mini distros is what caused desktop Linux to fail isn't true though. These projects are nothing more than the IT equivalent of your friend's mix tape. Or your girlfriend's slightly modified Martha Stewart recipe she boasts as her own.
FWIW back in the days where Ubuntu used Unity, I tried to change my DE and fucked up my system, Idk, maybe I wasn't enough skilled to do thag1, but that was what make me switch to Fedora.
You are spot on yet at the same time this is about 99% of Linux.
Would love to see us move back towards linux being linux (a kernel) and less of a need to even 'join' a Distro or pick sides if you will.
You are really picking a package manager and a philosophy on upstream software ... it is unfortunate you're implicitly or inadvertently being forced to pick about 11,000 other things too.
Those 11k other things are usually the minimum needed to have a production ready system that doesn't require you as a user to jump through hoops to provision and maintain.
Either it does not come with a browser installed, or the browser is not added to that launch bar or they changed the browser icon but not the email client icon.
As the email client icon highlights, that icon theming does not make anything more beautiful because a lot of applications do not have an icon which would fit into the theme.
Network adapter selection, charging status and other things which most are not constantly interested in are in the middle of the most important UI element. Put those somewhere so that those are not constantly in my way.
Power button is also right there in the most important UI element. I don't know how others use their machines, but I'm not constantly pressing the power button of my computer. Put it somewhere where other unimportant things belong. And how does a power button, some number thingy and trash can belong to the same area?
Nothing makes sense. Default gnome and KDE are more beautiful and work better. Here's the default Ubuntu desktop https://149366088.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/202... Browser icon looks like browser icon. Icons are beautiful as their original designer intended. System settings related things like network, battery and power thingies are moved away from the importan things.
Well, now that you bring up Ubuntu, I wonder if anyone else out there dislikes its purple & orange color scheme. It might technically be a selection of compatible colors, but to me it's always looked ugly.
I also dislike Ubuntus default background images so I use my own. There really isn't anything purple in Ubuntu default theme other than the background image.
I always disliked orange. Not sure if it's because all those old school books in the 70's that used black and orange for the only colors. But that is the associations I get from orange. Old school books.
Indeed.. I have been a Ubuntu user for some time, but have recently switched to KDE due to the latest Ubuntu desktop experiments which really put me off.
After installing KDE Plasma, which I thought was a single DE, I was surprised to learn that, on the login page, I can actually select different DEs, like Cinnamon, Plasma, Ubuntu, Unity, Wayland... that's really amazing! I have played around with Plasma and Cinnamon, and decided to stick with Cinnamon (after tweaking it with the dark theme, it looks awesome). So happy to have many choices though.
I wonder why people still feel the need to come up with more DEs instead of contributing to the plenty of existing ones...
Personally, I like Ubuntu Mate. But hey, I just want functional with a ui that doesn't hide nice things like open terminal here, and the address bar, etc.
Looks pretty, but being a bit out of the loop I'd really appreciate a quick "What's Deepin Desktop Environment?" and why I would want it on the landing page!
It's a pretty debian-based distro. It's made by a company in Wuhan so presumably it has great Chinese character integration, and, by extension, support for other alphabets besides en.
Deepin Desktop environment is the DE developed for the distro named .... Deepin, by a Chinese company, it's actually a fork of GNOME 3 focused on "beauty"
I've used elementary os [1] in the past. This initially looks similar, but less polished. I hadn't heard of dde [2] before. It'd be nice to explain it on this page or provide a link.
>UbuntuDDE is a Remix flavor of Ubuntu system with Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) . UbuntuDDE is a linux distribution based on Ubuntu with the most beautiful desktop environment.
So by imitating macOS look they got "the most beautiful desktop environment".
I don't get it. If I want macOS, I would run the real deal, either by buying a Mac or by doing a hackintosh install.
Earlier there were Linux distros trying to imitate Windows XP. That was bad, too.
I think time wasted and effort would be better spent on inventing something new or refining some ideas striving to do something better, trying to solve problems.
I don't get the problem this desktop environment solves. Are they catering to people who love Macs but don't want to use Macs? That's a rather tiny population.
Or maybe the problem they tried to solve was Linux having too few desktop environments.
It's a common practice in the Ubuntu's world to create a new distro just to change the DE: Kubuntu (KDE), Xubuntu (Xfce I think) , ... and now UbuntuDDE. It's even encouraged by Ubuntu's maintainers iirc.
From wikipedia,
>The development of deepin is led by China-based Wuhan Deepin Technology Co., Ltd. The company generates revenue through the sale of technical support and other services related to it.[12]
The distribution is widely praised for its aesthetics in various reviews, while also has been criticized for having used a statistical tracking service in its App Store, which was removed in July 2018.
For the most beautiful DE, it's so... meh. It's a shame. Does anyone here remember Beryl? Now that was mindblowing stuff, still can't wrap my head around the fact it's dead...
Oh right, I forgot all the cool things I had enabled on Compiz: live zoom, wobbly windows, the burn effect. Transparent windows! Those were great. The cube, of course. The shift switcher. Expose.
Looking at the source code of one of the critical pieces of that distro, we can see that it has about 5 active devs (in the past 2 years). To me it looks like a strong project. Will be interesting to see where it is in 5 years. They need more presence on the various Linux news/discussion sites.
A few years ago I installed FreeBSD on my main machine, and actually used it for some time (6ish months?).
It was really nice that I could actually google things, and usually come to a mailing list or the FreeBSD manual for my version of the OS, and then actually be able to find what I was looking for and have it work (most of the time).
It's the opposite with Linux. Yeah, this is just another "hey lets copy osx and pretend we're actually doing something real" project, and more than likely, everything will work fine just like in the standard ubuntu, but it's still just another fragment in the already overcrowded and starting-to-stink-from-all-the-dead-projects ecosystem.
I get the freedom to do everything you want, fork this, change that, I get that 100%, but man it would be nice to have Linux be unified.
This is not eye-candy it's minimum s I need to get work done!
This is as low as a bar I can imagine but last time I checked from the mainstream Linux DEs, only a version of KDE/Plasma (can't stand KDE, so was a no-go out of the bat) had this.
Can't see any suggestion that this is officially sanctioned or supported by either trademark holder. Canonical defend the use of "Ubuntu". I would expect a name change fairly soon.
And using SourceForge in 2020 doesn't fill me with confidence.
Linux GUIs have a problem understanding the difference between beauty as a visual attribute and beauty as a functional product. They never have one without the other.
No, Elementary and Poppin don't count. I wish they did.
Linux is never beautiful IMO. There are so few packages out there that actually have good UI/UX design that you could put whatever DE you want on a distro and it will still be ugly.
Whenever I use Linux I pretty much always end up right back at running Openbox because it ends up being one less thing to get in the way.
My argument is that you can choose any desktop environment you want with the most well designed window decorations, but as long as you have most packages built on GTK+ or Qt by people that aren't UI/UX experts, your system is going to be ugly.
examples: https://ubuntudde.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ubuntudde-l... https://ubuntudde.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ubuntudde-f...
There are better screenshots behind the "Digital Assets" nav link, but I wouldn't have found that, or thought to look there for screenshots if I wasn't concerned about replies to this comment proving me wrong.