Grandma will be thankful when you install deepin Linux 20.3 on her PC this Thanksgiving

This Thursday is one of my favorite holidays -- Thanksgiving! While I will absolutely fill my (large) belly with turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and other traditional foods, I will be sure to celebrate the true nature of the day as well -- being thankful. This year, I am thankful for my health, my family, and of course... Linux!

Yup, folks, we should all be thankful that many wonderful Linux distributions exist, making it possible for people to enjoy truly free and open source software. One of the prettiest Linux-based operating systems is deepin. Today, version 20.3 of the Debian-based operating system becomes available for download, meaning you can install it on your Grandma's computer after eating her yummy cooking. What better way to thank your Thanksgiving host than replacing Windows with Linux for them? Forget dual-booting. She will be so pleasantly surprised when she turns on the computer!

"In deepin 20.3, the Stable kernel is upgraded to version 5.15 with better compatibility, system security vulnerabilities are fixed, some deepin applications come with new features and optimizations to meet the needs under different scenarios, and DDE issues are fixed and optimized to improve the overall user experience. The Stable kernel is upgraded to version 5.15 with better support for Intel 12th Gen processors and NTFS file systems, and better system compatibility. Both LTS and Stable kernels can be installed and manually upgraded in deepin," explains the developers.

The devs also share, "Album provides a better batch selection of photos and new buttons for quick actions, supports importing, previewing, and searching videos, displays the number of photos and videos separately in the status bar, and improves the interactions of main functions, making photo and video management more convenient. Screen Capture supports taking a long scrollshot instead of several screenshots. In the process of taking scrollshots, all you need to do is to scroll the page. The OCR feature released in deepin 20.2.4 is also available under scrollshot scenarios to extract text from the image easily."

The deepin Linux developers share a changelog below.

DDE

• Added: a shortcut for the Global Search, which also supports searching markdown files.
• Optimized: the minimum scale of volume in the Dock.
• Optimized: if the extended mode is selected under the multi-display environment, in the context menu of the Dock, you can set how to display the Dock on multiple displays.
• Optimized: the time and date in the Control Center.
• Optimized: Bluetooth pairing prompts.
• Optimized: playback pause logic of multimedia files after Bluetooth disconnection.

File Manager

• Added: in the list view, columns can be dragged to change the order.
• Added: the color for the current tab.
• Added: the mounted Samba shares are permanently shown in the left panel and the computer page.
• Added: the computer page can be finally reached by pressing the Backspace key.
• Optimized: change the context menu "Log out and unmount" to "Clear saved password and unmount" for remote mountings.
• Optimized: change the fallback path from "Home" to "Computer" after ejecting removable devices.
• Optimized: selection logic when pressing the Ctrl/Shift key and dragging the mouse.

Movie

• Added: video information interface.
• Added: decoding settings.
• Added: ffmpeg supports NVIDIA graphics cards.
• Optimized: prompts for abnormal audio and video playback.

Screen Capture

• Added: take scrollshots and support manual and automatic scrolling.
• Added: the preview of scrollshots.
• Added: OCR support of scrollshots.
• Optimized: the save paths of screenshots and video recordings.

Draw

• Added: dimension settings for exported pictures.
• Optimized: the eraser functions.
• Optimized: the display effect of imported pictures.

Album

• Added: video management.
• Added: video preview.
• Added: video search.
• Added: display the number of photos and video separately.
• Optimized: batch import of pictures.

Input Methods

• Added: drag input methods to change the list order.
• Added: advanced settings.
• Added: group input methods by languages.
• Added: restore to default settings.

Document Viewer

• Added: the print entrance.

Music

• Added: the "Add Music" button in an empty playlist.
• Added: add music using the context menu of a playlist.

Voice Notes

• Added: customize the order of notes.
• Added: more text-editing features, including bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, etc.
• Added: hide and show the notebook panel.

Games

• Added: Lianliankan and Gomoku games.

Graphics Card

• Added: support for 2K hard decoding of OLAND chips.

DDE

• Fixed: under 1.25x display scaling, the file on the desktop dragged from the File Manager cannot be opened.
• Fixed: in the Bluetooth module of the Control Center, the edited names of Bluetooth devices cannot be saved and the input box did not work normally.
• Fixed: the slow response when switching from the Control Center to the Notification Center.
• Fixed: the time was not completely shown in the Dock after the font size was adjusted.
• Fixed: results were shown when there was no result actually in the Global Search.
• Fixed: applications installed by deb packages cannot be uninstalled correctly in the launcher.
• Fixed: woke up the computer from the suspend mode and entered the correct password, but the system cannot be entered in.
• Fixed: enabled "Auto Login" and "Login Without Password", and entered the correct password in a normal boot, the system cannot be entered in for the first time.

File Manager

• Fixed: if the disk encryption was enabled during the system installation, and the full-text search was checked in the settings, the file search speed was very slow.
• Fixed: it crashed during the full-text search if there was an encrypted PDF file.
• Fixed: some options in the right-click menu on the desktop were missed within three minutes after restarting some computers.
• Fixed: manually mounted the USB flash drive to the /data directory, and deleted the files in it, it prompted that you have no permission.
• Fixed: burning failed if an empty text file was burned to a UDF disc.
• Fixed: after selecting a file in the mounted MTP device, checking "Show item counts and sizes in the path of mounted MTP devices" in settings, and selecting another file, the file info was not refreshed on the status bar.
• Fixed: when the primary screen displayed the screensaver, inserted a secondary screen, the secondary screen showed the desktop instead of the screensaver.
• Fixed: on some computers, the selection state of files reselected by pressing the CTRL key and dragging the mouse on the desktop was inconsistent with that shown in the File Manager.
• Fixed: a crash occurred on some computers when clicking the icon of the information column after selecting a file.
• Fixed: two compression windows popped up after right-clicking a file and choosing "Compress".

App Store

• Fixed: it might crash if pausing the downloading.
• Fixed: unable to click the Delete or Cancel icon in the deletion confirmation dialog.
• Fixed: unable to pause all downloading tasks by clicking "Pause All".
• Optimized: adjusted the trigger area for redownloading under the abnormal state.
• Fixed: the selection state of apps on the one-click installation page might be incorrect.
• Fixed: the type in the configuration file was shown as "other" after searching and installing game apps.

Browser

• Fixed: the crash issue in the process of clicking the forward and backward icon in the title bar quickly.
• Fixed: when the uploaded jpeg image from the external device was larger than 10 MB, the dialog box cannot be exited by pressing the ESC key, and the focus was on the custom tab page.
• Fixed: light scroll bar was shown when the system theme was dark.
• Fixed: the background of the opened tabs was not restored to the default after resetting the custom background to the default.
• Fixed: the custom background of the opened tabs was not synchronized automatically.
• Fixed: the logo was not displayed in the address bar and search engine management page when Google was set as the default search engine.
• Fixed: there was a small white block in the lower right corner when the window was adjusted to the minimum size under the dark theme.

Draw

• Fixed: the wrong cursor position when there was text with different font sizes in the same row.

Calculator

• Fixed: the Clear icon was wrongly displayed in the process of inputting an operator after clearing contents in the input box and history box.
• Fixed: on a touchscreen, the content in the input box still existed after right-clicking and choosing "Cut" or "Delete" under non-standard mode.

System Installer

• Updated: updated the GRUB EFI program to generate EFI files with the latest version of GRUB.
• Fixed: the boot loading failure of Xen.

Font Manager

• Fixed: the corresponding fonts were not deleted completely after the font files in the User font and System font directory were deleted.
• Fixed: the Delete/Disable/Enable popup was not adjusted accordingly in real-time and was wrongly displayed in the process of adjusting the font size.
• Fixed: the verification popup would be stuck and displayed in transparency in the process of installing TTC fonts.
• Fixed: the Enable/Disable/Delete popup of font families closed unexpectedly after pressing the Tab key to move the cursor focus to "Apply to all selected font families", and pressing the Enter key.

If you are ready to install deepin Linux 20.3, you can download an ISO here. While surprises are nice, you should always check with the owner of a PC before making any changes. In other words, even though I am confident your Grandma, Grandpa, or other Thanksgiving host would absolutely love having Windows replaced with a Linux distro from China, you should definitely get their permission first.

Image credit: Pensee Sauvage / Shutterstock