While the Deepin Linux development team continues to work on version 23 to be released in a few months, the team has announced another stable release of the Deepin 20 series, which brings some small refinements to the Deepin desktop environment and its core applications, to make the user experience better and greater.
The new version is Deepin 20.8, and it comes with a new application installed by default called Deepin Home, which, as its name suggests, is an interface for communication between the distribution development team and users. Through this application, users will get the latest notifications and news from the development team, learn how to join the Deepin internal testing program, and get the distribution's social account links.
The app also contains links to the distribution's wiki, the Deepin Github repository, and frequently asked questions; users will also soon be able to report bugs they find in the distribution and make suggestions on developing Deepin, directly from the Deepin Home app.
In Deepin 20.8, the file management functions have been further improved, as the app now supports saving files on a disk as image files, external devices can be renamed and formatted directly from the right-click menu, and users can set custom screensaver with their favorite images.
Moreover, The "Hide system disk" in the File Manager settings has been changed to "Hide built-in disks", the desktop process icon has been replaced in the System Monitor app, and a new "Merge the entries of Samba shared folders" setting has been added in Settings > Mount menu.
With this release, Deepin Store gains support for decompressing Wine applications during the downloading process, improving the opening speed of Wine apps after installation, the visual effects in the store's "Updates" and "Manage" pages have also been improved, and users can also now select, copy and paste comments in the app detail pages.
In addition, the nvidia-driver-510, nvidia-graphics-drivers-470, and nvidia-graphics-drivers-390 driver packages are integrated into the Deepin 20.8 installation image, so Nvidia devices will be automatically detected and installed with the appropriate drivers during system installation. The Linux Kernel has been updated to 5.15.77 LTS and Qt to version 5.15.6, the slow opening issue of the Goodix fingerprint sensor driver has been fixed, and the Deepin system logo is now dynamic at system startup.
In Deepin Web Browser, the "Open URL in address bar in a new tab" is no longer selected by default, and gained an improved back and forward buttons look, and the Deepin Mail now supports exiting a search by pressing the ESC key.
On the other hand, the self-developed Linglong packaging format is not available in the distribution repositories, and it cannot be installed using the commands on the installation guide page of the official packaging format website, which is very strange.
In addition, even if the user successfully installs Linglong on the distribution, it cannot install any application using either the command line (ll-cli command) nor the graphical interface of the Linglong installer, because the package is trying to connect to a non-existent URL address to perform the installation. We hope it will be fixed soon, so we can test the new format and explore more about it.
Other than that, this version comes with dozens of bug fixes for various components and applications of the distribution, so it is important to update to this new version of Deepin if you use it as a daily driver OS by going to the Settings --> Updates, then click on "Check for Updates".