Seems Deepin is getting harder to keep supported by Manjaro

[philm]

With the latest ISO we have a brief preview of upcoming changes to Deepin. You can find also some news here. A new security concern discussion got started here:

User Experience Program

Also our user @ant is stopping his ArchDeepin project with given reasons:

Discountinuing archdeepin

So with given struggle chasing for bugs, is Deepin still a good choice for Manjaro, or should we drop it?

• Keep maintaining packages and overlay packages by Manjaro
• Drop Deepin packages by blacklisting and stopping maintaining overlay packages by Manjaro
• You may stop maintaining overlay packages but keep Arch packages as is

[masterfix]

I would say dropping Deepin support would be best solution for now.Even if it is shiny it is not mature DE with many flaws bugs and minor customization

[jonathon]

Deepin issues form a large part of help requests on the forum. It really does appear to be overly buggy and it reflects poorly on Manjaro, especially when we have a Community edition which people assume will work just as well as the other editions.

Given we can't fix DeepinDE and it keeps introducing regressions and bugs, I voted to completely drop all of it.

Edit:

A little more context after reading some more of the bug reports.

DeepinDE is targeted at DeepinOS so it's understandable it might not work as expected on a rolling-release distro. If there are people like @ant and @keybreak who are enthusiasts about the DE and essentially want to "port" it to Arch then that's great - but porting to an "unsupported" platform is a lot of work and including development changes (like the new deepin-kwin WM package) can't be done without considering whether they're actually ready.

If DeepinDE is targeted at a frozen-pool release schedule (e.g. building against specific package and library versions) then building on a rolling-release distro will introduce extra, unforeseen issues as and when libraries change and introduce new features and incompatibilities.

This isn't the fault of the DeepinDE developers, and it's unrealistic to expect them to continually fix and update their software outside of their normal release schedule.

Therefore, Manjaro shouldn't be setting an unrealistic expectation of the DeepinDE developers by forcing their software into being something it isn't.

[Mr.J]

Jonathon is right. I have tested Manjaro Deepin a few times and I appreciate the fresh design but I always got in trouble with Deepin after just a few updates and a change between the stable and testing branch. I thought that this happened because of the change but now I have got the impression that Deepin has to work out a few problems. By the way it should be mentioned that with the official editions, i.e. Gnome and Xfce, this problem never occured; the whole system is more robust.
It causes nothing else than complaining users and bad reviews if Manjaro continues to offer this DE as jonathon has explained in his post.

[Librewish]

what about the userbase which is already using
deepin edition of manjaro.
if you completely blacklist it.
they will be forced by manjaro to change the distro/de.
well but either way its problem.

[lafurus]

Come on, I installed Manjaro DDE just yesterday and it is very good. I don't realize issues, and it not come to me too big issues. Of course, I don't know processes of maintaining but as a end user Manjaro DDE is looking very good.

Anyway, I am not programmer, I am a social scientist, I don't know and I can't understand what exactly is going on. But It looks to me this is likely corollary of trade war. Because Deepin team just wrote their planning and even we didn't saw what they did, right? And as far as I know it will be open source, and we will see what they are doing. If they produce closed codes, we can think again about situation. Therefore it is just prejudice for me. And this sentence will be politic but it is true, firstly USA must stop spying to people. Apple, Facebook, Google all of them spying us better and longer time than any Chinese company. Anyway, this is true we are using Linux because of these issue, this situation is important to us therefore previous argument can be meaningless. But these are becoming because of our perception. We are doing just prejudge about Chinese company or society.

In the second part of subject about problems of DDE: Gnome also have a lot of problem. For example desktop icons in Ubuntu, it is very funny. In 2019, you can't drop down any icons directly desktop, and they can't resolve this problem . As far as I know DDE is younger than Gnome and KDE. Problems could be normal. But their desktop environment is just beautiful. And I can bear DDE problems more than Gnome problems because it is more beautiful and there are no performance difference. But in this subject, for me it is decision of maintainer. Because maintainer working on these problems as a voluntarily. And if maintainer says I am bored and I just quiting, it is okay for me.

And lastly, Deepin gave us a really beautiful desktops, end of dozen years. Because of this thanks to them. And also I want say thank you to who bring this beautiful desktop to beautiful system such as Manjaro.

And of course all were my personnel opinions, I am not expert in these subjects, if I have written something wrong I am sorry.

[keybreak]

This is problem number one right now, even apart from bugs:

User Experience Program

It really pains a lot to see Manjaro also come to this decision...Especially given circumstances that i have 3 computers running Manjaro Deepin daily.

But i personally voted for keeping Arch packages, so hopefully we can find maintainers / developers which can help felixonmars maintain / test / report Arch packages.

He maintains almost half of all Arch packages himself (2915 to be precise https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?maintainer=felixonmars), which is absolutely insane - he need help there.

But of course i support all of your concerns and will understand if you need to move away from it.

[Kadee]

Good grief! Why not take some time to read through the forum posts/threads for the past month or 10, to ascertain the disproportionate volume of Deepin-based "cries for help". It's not much good being "pretty" if one is also unreliable & difficult to maintain.

[jonathon]

I might be persuaded that dropping the Community edition image but keeping the Arch packages in the repos will be fine.

That way existing users can keep using it, any new fixes can be applied, but there shouldn't be any "new" installs which are "semi-officially supported".

However, given we have three very solid Official DEs (how many Xfce issues do you see on the forum?), and given the efforts made by the KDE developers to specifically support downstream distros, including Manjaro, I'd rather people spent their time improving those instead.

For example - if it's all about looks then could KDE be made as "beautiful" as DeepinDE?

[Librewish]

@jonathon

if it's all about looks then could KDE be made as "beautiful" as DeepinDE

kde already is more beautiful than deepin just that many user dont know how to make kde beautiful like using kvantum and latte-dock.

user

[masterfix]

The irony is that fedora just picked up this DE with release of Fedora 30. I tried it in Virtualbox yesterday -it was a trip

[keybreak]

@jonathon

For example - if it's all about looks then could KDE be made as "beautiful" as DeepinDE?

Not only looks, but design philosophy / workflow / shortcuts / straight-forward & intuitive designs...
Some of it is pretty sublime on all levels.

And you can actually customize a lot of it, if you know where to look for config files / hidden options.

It's really a lot, and i personally haven't seen anyone in Linux world have done even closely as good as what they already had (outside of last months bugs of course).

For example even file manager is a state of art, i wouldn't drop it for anything out there in terms of usability (even though there are far more stable & customizable file managers out there).

@Librewish
You've done brilliant job on your .iso, kudos!
But it's not same at all, i mean...

Some things are just second to none in Deepin outside of kvantum and latte-dock customizations.

[Librewish]

you see we can replicate deepin in kde
i just dont like to replicate deepin or i would have done it.
its just about spending some time customizing kde to match the deepin.in shortcuts.
the only thing you cant replicate is side bar and dock
also you can use deepin apps in kde.
and you can replace dolphin by deepin filemanager as kde desktop is not provided by dolphin.

though that will be Frankenstein's monster made from different parts.
but aslong as it lives (work) its success.
one such example lxqt-kwin.

[Kadee]

@jonathon

could KDE be made as "beautiful" as DeepinDE?

Oh no, nooooooooooooooo, no... i don't wanna downgrade my Plasma.

[keybreak]

Oh and btw guys, before making quick judgements about your vote - please actually read what BLumia have said here, i believe this is important part:

Good idea, let me tell you a story. So the first step is let the boss hire two fulltime QA to working on this, whoops, we need money to pay for them, then we need customer pay us money, customer are sending new feature request or they won't pay to our boss so we then need to work on that no-sense feature request now. Then we found that mips and ARM port breaks, and then developers need extra work time to get bug fixed. After get everything works again, two developer leaved the development team due to the high work load, customer feels bad about the release delay and stop planning buying the product. Now what should we do? Oh of course we should get two person get unpaid to do QA for Deepin. Is that right?

Things are not that easy as you imaged, we both would like to do better, but is that really helpful to just complain about bug without information provided and yelling developer about new code brings new bug?

Here 3:00 AM now and it's of course not working time. I am not even a manager of Deepin, I just would like to become one of a bridge to help Deepin become more community-friendly and help community people make better use of DDE. I did these extra things completely voluntary without paying any extra cent to me and I think that is already all what I can do now. It is totally fine if you doesn't have time or energy to help Deepin community out, but what's the point yelling to others who would like to help the community out and treat them as a free-of-charge customer support guy? I did also feel very frustrated since it seems all what I've done seems doesn't helps at all. Maybe I should calm down for a few days, stop do volunteering on Deepin community and take a rest. Sorry about that.

(c) https://github.com/linuxdeepin/developer-center/issues/1260#issuecomment-497971095

It was very honest and opening about why they actually having those issues right now, so.

@jonathon

This isn't the fault of the DeepinDE developers, and it's unrealistic to expect them to continually fix and update their software outside of their normal release schedule.

Therefore, Manjaro shouldn't be setting an unrealistic expectation of the DeepinDE developers by forcing their software into being something it isn't.

I agree with you.
That being said, i think this is important to note that if we want any Deepin edition to work:

1. We support them as community and help improve good that they already have and avoid bad...
2. Help felixonmars maintain / develop / test packages for Arch + making pull-requests for quickfixing the bugs
3. Also i must add, that as an active tester of Manjaro / Arch Deepin, original distro and ocasional Fedora Deepin - i would like to state that 99% of all bugs are same & reproduciable across the board, with rare exceptions, it's not problems of fixed vs rolling release models per se.

P.S.

@jonathon

DeepinDE is targeted at DeepinOS so it's understandable it might not work as expected on a rolling-release distro. If there are people like @ant and @keybreak who are enthusiasts about the DE and essentially want to "port" it to Arch then that's great - but porting to an "unsupported" platform is a lot of work and including development changes (like the new deepin-kwin WM package) can't be done without considering whether they're actually ready.

I'd like to try that, if i'd had more time & experience on my hands, but it's no realistic either right now at least for myself.

[lafurus]

I am sorry, I didn't want to impolite, from your mention I understand that I was rude. I am trying to improve myself about English.

Just for instance, I used Manjaro too long, and also I remember that systemd issues, and they didn't stop use systemd.

And in the unreliable part, I remember that former spying issue about Deepin. And I watched some videos about this subject like "Is that deepin really spy us?". And as far as I understand It was just American-European prejudge again. Too many people is using nvidia-proprietary drivers and they are beliving deepin is spying us. If you were not using anything closed-source even hardware, I accept you are right. But these are coming to me just like North Korean things. Sorry I am getting out of topics, but I am just trying express myself. In North Korea people are dying because of famine and we are thinking that what a poor. We are saying they can't even feed their citizens. What a poor communist, authoritarian regime. But truth is they are dying because of natural famine, and we are blocking transportation of any food. In this situation any country would be same. I am not saying for you, or any individual. I think in these issue, some parts is politics. I am just saying these.

And as I say in my first post, I am not developer and I am not expert, I am just trying to express what I saw. And for me it is important that the telling these things, because these are effecting us (our thoughts, our behaves) too much. And I am saying we are just doing prejudge about in tracker thing. Because we only read one line about it from deepin.

Edit: And one example, in this link, you can see what fedora collect. I am not saying that "Fedora is doing this therefore Deepin can do anything". I am just saying we are not going on to Fedora like Deepin. When deepin did something, it becoming big deal because of (for me) they are Chineses.

[milisav]

I'd rather have Pantheon than deepin but both are buggy outside their distros

[bigverm23]

ewwww, a MacOS style dock, no thank you. Nothing touches Deepin in my humble opinion.

Nothing out there is better

[mandog]

Unfortunately Deepin like unity were never intended to be used on non fixed distros Deepin being more problematic than unity as the software is outdated by years not months. Mint over came this by forking everything for Cinnamon. I personally find when using deepin its lost direction or maybe it has a fixed direction that is simply Deepin on Debian that may be a good thing in the long run for both Deepin and Debian.

[jonathon]

@keybreak

It was very honest and opening about why they actually having those issues right now, so.

Yes, but it also indicates an issue with their current development model.

If they are working for a company which is entirely reliant on a single customer, and that customer has entirely unrealistic expectations about how the product should work or how it can be written, then that's something for their company to address.

If their "boss" doesn't understand the problems they're having then they either need to put forward a better argument or find another job - which is what two other people have already done. And, if the only developers of DeepinDE are paid employees, and those jobs are insecure, then the ongoing development of DeepinDE itself is not robust and that kind of reinforces the argument for dropping it.