If you are fans of the Deepin OS desktop environment, this news may be to your liking, because recently the availability of a trial version of the distribution UbuntuDDE, based on the code base of the next version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The distribution comes with the DDE graphical environment (Deepin Desktop Enveronment), which is the main shell of the Deepin distribution and is also optionally offered in Manjaro. Unlike Deepin Linux, UbuntuDDE comes with the Ubuntu Software Center (Snap Store based on the Gnome Software Center) instead of the Deepin application store catalog.
The project it is still an unofficial edition of Ubuntu, but the developers of the distribution are negotiating with Canonical to include UbuntuDDE in the official Ubuntu distributions.
Since as many of you will know the standard version of Ubuntu uses the GNOME desktop environment, but there are also special versions from Ubuntu called Flavors (flavors), in which we will find environments such as MATE, Xfce, Budgie, LxQt, KDE and Kylin.
However, there are more environments we can install Ubuntu with some of them (including Ubuntu Cinnamon) which are called Remixes and UbuntuDDE joins the last group, that uses Deepin Desktop Environment.
This environment is developed using the C / C ++ (Qt5) and Go languages. A key feature is the panel, which supports various modes of operation.
In classic mode, a more explicit separation of open windows and applications offered for startup is performed, and the system tray area is displayed.
The effective mode is somewhat reminiscent of Unity, mixing indicators of running programs, selected applications, and control applets (volume / brightness settings, connected drives, clocks, network status, etc.).
The program's start interface is displayed in full screen and offers two modes: view your favorite applications and browse the catalog of installed programs.
Developer Arun notes that:
The new version was created by combining the updated packages from the Deepin repository with Ubuntu 20.04. Arun also said that the Ubuntu Snapcraft, Budgie and Cinnamon teams also helped a lot in the creation. So UbuntuDDE is the result of our great cooperation, added Arun.
In addition, points out that a disadvantage of Deepin is the Spyware that was in the Store in 2018. At that time, it was learned that Deepin was collecting personal data from users of the store. Therefore, many are those who no longer trust him.
For the same reason, instead of containing the Deepin Store, UbuntuDDE comes with the Ubuntu software center. Furthermore, the repositories also support the classic ubuntu PPA.
Si you want to know more about this new proposal To become an official flavor of Ubuntu, you can consult the discussion forums where you can find more information as well as solutions to some common problems (in case you had encouraged to try the distro). The link is this.
Download and get UbuntuDDE
Finally, for those who are interested in obtaining the UbuntuDDE 20.04 installation image should go to the official website of the distro and in its download section you will find the links to download it.
The size of the iso image is 2.6 GB. The link is this.
To be able to record the image on a USB device, you can use Etcher which is a multiplatform tool (Windows, Linux and Mac OS).
Or in the case of those who use Windows, they can also opt for Rufus, which is also an excellent tool.
Besides, andIt is important to note that its developers do not recommend the distro as it is at the moment for daily use, so they only recommend its use for tests and to be able to polish all those details that are still missing.
That is why the use of an application is recommended to create a virtual machine and be able to test the distro on it and thus avoid the loss of information.