Chinese-made deepin 20.7 Linux distro is ready to replace Windows 11 on your PC
Once of the most beautiful and user-friendly operating systems is a Linux distribution from China called deepin. If you are dissatisfied with Windows 11 or macOS, and you are intrigued by Linux, deepin can be a great choice if you highly value beauty and well-designed user interfaces.
The newest version of that operating system, deepin 20.7, is now ready to be downloaded, and it is chock-full of bug fixes and new features such as improved Grand Search with Google integration and an enhanced Mail app with new calendar functionality. Yes, this looks to be the best version of deepin yet!
"In deepin 20.7, we have developed and integrated a great number of practical functions based on the community users' feedback, synchronized with the upstream kernel version, fixed underlying vulnerabilities, upgraded the Stable kernel to V5.15.45, added the HWE 5.18 kernel to be compatible with more devices, and further improved system compatibility and security," explains the development team.
The developers share an extensive changelog below.
Kernel
- Updated the lTS kernel to V5.15.45 by following the upstream.
- Added the HWE 5.18 kernel to be compatible with more devices.
Control Center
- Added the internal test entry in Control Center, by which you can switch on the slider to join the internal test.
- Optimized the usage logic of input methods and keyboard layouts to make them better meet the usage habits of both Chinese users and overseas users.
- Added more formats for short date.
- Added the effect when an app was right clicked in the launcher.
Calendar
- Added the settings for the "First day of week" - Sunday or Monday, effective in the daily view and the yearly view.
- Added support for creating new events by dragging and dropping a specific date on the right pane in the daily view.
- Optimized the window's default size and minimum size.
- Optimized the display logic of red dots on gray dates in the yearly view.
- Optimized the UI effect when clicking on a specific date in the yearly view.
Camera
- Added support for saving videos in MP4.
Album
- Optimized the window minimum size to 630*300 pixels.
Screen Capture
- Disabled the text tool, options menu, scrolling screenshots, extracting text, pinning screenshots, and screen recording on the lock screen.
- Added the calendar, supporting event management and sync.
- Added support for batch importing CSV files.
- Added the recipient prediction function.
- Added the settings for the default font style for composing emails.
- Added more functions for the graphic editing and style configuration of the rich text editor.
- Added phishing reminders for some corporate mailboxes.
- Added the drag and drop interaction for importing and exporting contacts, and optimized field mapping of vcf files.
- Optimized the layout and display of the email body.
- Optimized the deletion interaction of mailboxes.
- Optimized the logic of loading emails.
Browser
- Added Google Translate in the context menu for translating English websites.
- Added the entries - New Window and New Incognito Window, if right-clicking the browser icon in the dock.
- Optimized the rounded corners and tab bar height.
Grand Search
- Auto changes the default search engine according to system languages.
- The default search engine can be configured according to user needs.
- The "More" button of a category under search results can be triggered by the Enter key.
Others
- Added support for Qt6.
- The nvidia-vaapi-driver library is integrated, supporting enabling nvidia vaapi hard decoding for Firefox browser.
- Biometric authentication supports more Goodix fingerprint scanners.
Bug Fixes
DDE
- Fixed: UI issues on some devices.
Music
- Fixed: on some devices, when a song directory was added, all songs in other directories at the same level were also added.
Terminal
- Fixed: when a terminal window was at a position across two screens in the dual-screen mode, pressed Ctrl+Shift+? to call out the shortcut windows, their positions were different each time.
File Manager
- Fixed: if a USB flash drive was formatted into vfat, in the next disk format process, its format was displayed as ext3.
- Fixed: after right-clicking multiple folders and opening them with File Manager, Package Installer popped up instead of File Manager.
- Fixed: after searching for non-existing files in the FTP server, and returning back to the upper-level directory, it was displayed incorrectly.
- Fixed: when "Show file system on disk icon" was checked or unchecked in Settings, it did not take effect immediately.
- Fixed: folders permanently deleted were not completely deleted and no error message was shown.
- Fixed: the transfer progress for sending large files from smb servers was displayed abnormally.
Movie
- Fixed: when audio files were played, the default volume was low
- Fixed: the video could not be played if the video name contained {}
Browser
- Fixed: the refreshing effect was wrongly displayed if clicking "Retry" after the extension installation failed.
- Fixed: some videos on webpages cannot be played and failed to load the Netease mailbox webpage.
- Fixed: the background changes in one window were not synced to another opening window.
- Fixed: the long event name was not displayed completely in the text box when a new event was created.
Screen Capture
- Fixed: the text recognition accuracy was low if there was no large blank space around the image.
Image Viewer
- Fixed: the memory usage kept increasing which resulted in memory leakage in the process of switching and viewing images.
AppStore
- Fixed: UI text issues.
- Fixed: if the system language was Spanish or Polish, the app page was displayed wrongly when App Store was minimized.
Control Center
- Changed the text in the advanced settings of input methods.
- Fixed: the input methods' third-level settings cannot be searched for in the search box of Control Center.
- Fixed: there was a prompt box of input methods during system upgrades on some devices.
- Fixed: the input method was selected incorrectly if right-clicking the input method icon when it did not get focus.
Others
- Fixed: the blurred screen occurred in the Dock of the devices with Radeon graphics cards.
- Fixed: after closing multiple windows continuously, the window crashed, and the window effect cannot be enabled again after turning it off.
- Fixed security vulnerabilities to improve system security.
- Fixed: failed to wake up WINE applications on some devices by clicking the tray icons if the display was scaled.
- Updated qemu to solve the running failure of docker-desktop.
- Updated flatpak to solve the problem that flatpak apps were displayed abnormally in the Dock.
- Updated powertop to fix the issue that some devices could not run properly.
If you want to download deepin 20.7, you can grab an ISO here. Should you replace Windows 11 with deepin today? Well, maybe not today if you have never used Linux. Before making any decisions, you should try deepin first and make sure sure it truly meets your needs. If you do install it, however, I ask you share with me in the comments if you agree it's one of the most beautiful operating systems.
Image credit: Bruno135/depositphotos.com