Jumping into the Deepin Desktop Environment

I have seen a lot of reviews and screenshots of a Chinese Debian-based Linux distro which has its own desktop environment, Deepin Linux, which is the name of both the qt-based DE and the distro. Although I was tempted to try it, I still have this nagging suspicion about it, rightly or wrongly, I don't trust the distro.

Anyway, since the desktop environment and apps are open source, you can manually install them on another distro and some distros have Deepin versions or "respins" of them. Manjaro Deepin is one such distro. It's just as easy to install as Ubuntu, even though the installer works a little different. I decided to try it out in Virtualbox before I install it on any hardware.

By default, Deepin uses a Launchpad style launcher, and the panel working as a dock like recent MacOS versions, which I am not keen on.

Fortunately, you can click on an icon in the top right and it switches to a sensible menu like Windows or KDE. Right click on the dock/panel and select mode and choose Efficient Mode and that too becomes more Windows/KDE like, stretching the full width of the display.

Manjaro Deepin is quite good on resources, using just over 500MB after booting, certainly much lighter than Gnome.

You will also notice I have changed to a much more eye-friendly darker theme for everything,  which is easy to do in the Deepin Control Center and also individually on the apps, so you could mix and match if you wanted.

I really like the Deepin Control Center, it pops out from the right hand side. You can quickly scroll up and down it to change theme, display settings, network etc. It works really well as well as looking great. 


The Deepin Desktop Environment or DDE includes a whole bunch of its own apps, most notable of which included here are Deepin Music and Deepin Draw.

The file manager is reasonably decent, certainly better than nautilus, though still not quite as full featured as my favourite file manager, Dolphin. I'm a KDE user mainly, so being qt-based it should work well with my favourite KDE apps, the slight issue is by default KDE apps will not be in a dark theme, and K3b and Dolphin looked rather too bright without a dark theme.  I wasn't able to install the right bits of KDE to theme it, without installing all of KDE. I suppose I could logout, switch to KDE, set the theme to Breeze Dark, logout and then log back into Deepin.  The Gtk apps I installed such as  were a mixed bag, some came up dark, others were still bright, like VLC.

Sadly, judging by this post on the Manjaro Forum, I think Manjaro Deepin will probably be dropped by Manjaro devs since there's a lot of bugs, a lot caused by trying to shoehorn a desktop that is meant to run on a regular release based distro onto a rolling release distro. 

So, overall, the Deepin desktop is easy to use, fairly lightweight compared to most full desktops and has a much saner desktop setup than Gnome, but I don't think it will replace KDE as my desktop of choice, particularly as I would have to do a lot of messing about to get it how I want. It might however suit some users. The main issue with Deepin of course is finding the right distro to run it on if you do not want to use the actual Deepin distro. I think I will give Fedora a go with Deepin manually installed. 

From first gen HP Chromebook 14 to Acer Chromebook 14 (Full HD)

Not long ago, the screen cable on my 2 year old HP Chromebook 14 went flakey, so I decided to get a new Chromebook before attempting to repair the old one. My requirements were 4GB RAM, HD screen and 32GB SSD, and the Acer 14 (CB3-431-C5CQ) fitted the bill. I managed to get one recently when it was on offer. I was immediately impressed by the build quality of the metal body and beautiful Full HD screen. There's no obvious flexing of the body, it feels fairly durable for the price, only time and usage will tell.  And even though the Acer has a metal body it is actually a bit lighter at 1.54kg instead of 1.69kg on the HP 14. The lid actually folds back right flat, I noticed sometimes I accidentally flicked it into that position when picking it up with the lid open, but it does it no harm. One slight feature lacking is there's no SD card slot which is a shame as I used it a lot on my old HP. It has 2 USB 3.0 ports on the left-hand side and the power socket on the right-hand side.        

Setting up Chromebooks is pretty simple and painless. The Acer checked and installed an update as soon as put in my wireless details, though later on, after I had finished setup, it also downloaded yet another update in the background and is now running the latest Chrome OS version. Anyway, I put in my account details and it installed all my add-ons and synced bookmarks, passwords etc

The 14 inch 1080P semi-reflective display is amazing for such a cheap device, and big step up from the 1366x768 display on my old Chromebook. I was a little surprised that it was set to 1536x864 and not already set to 1080P but that was quickly rectified in settings. These days there are far too many 14/15 inch laptops with 1366x768 resolution screens, 1080P should be the minimum. I know some reviews have criticised  it for a lack of brightness but I found it's bright enough for me, and I've kept it at about 50% brightness most of the time.

I then claimed another 100GB free Google Drive storage (for 2 years) on the rewards page.

The Acer 14 feels noticeably quicker than my old HP, not surprisingly with a newer generation quad core 1.6 GHz (up to 2.24 GHz with Turbo Boost) N3160 Celeron CPU compared to the 1.4Ghz 2955U dual core CPU in the old HP 14. It really does feel very snappy, taking on much more than I could ever do with the HP. Battery life from the 3-cell Li-Po 3920 mAh battery is a claimed 12 hours compared to 8 hours on the old HP, despite being thinner. It is hard to measure battery life when I tend to just close the lid and put it down and pick it up all day, but I have been charging it less than the HP. 

And one last thing, the Acer CB3 will officially get Android apps at some point, (the HP is too old to get them) it is possible to get them with some dev mode noodling, but I would rather wait until they arrive for it in the Stable Chrome OS channel, I look forward to trying that out.

Overall this is a great spec Chromebook for the price and a decent upgrade from my old HP Chromebook 14. It's amazing how Chromebooks have improved in a short space of time. The only slight downside is this does not have user-replaceable SSD, and no SD slot, but at least this came with a 32GB in the first place. It is very quick and the screen is so much brighter and more vivid. It feels a bit more solid so hopefully will last me a good while. 

Kubuntu 16.04 Pre-Release Review

I was getting a bit tired of Mint KDE 17.3 on my main HP Z400 workstation (Quad core 2.5Ghz Xeon, 6GB RAM) like the way it holds back updates, plus for some reason it has been feeling rather sluggish and the final straw was Mint's user forum and main site getting hacked. If I cannot get help through their forum without them exposing my personal details then I will look elsewhere. The question was which distro should I try?

Well I wanted to stick with KDE and switch pretty quickly. I did consider Kaos Linux which is an interesting ground-up built distro that uses the package system and rolling release method from Arch. However having tried it in a VM, I would have had to spend a lot of time researching how to get all my favourite apps to install, and I needed to switch quicker than that. I'd also probably have to backup and format my Home partition. Plus 'bleeding-edge' distros are not really my cup of tea, I prefer stability over the latest apps. I know my way round apt-get and dpkg commands so well, I decided to go for Kubuntu 16.04. However since the final release is not due until the mid-April, I took a risk and installed a Daily build. This also made things easier because I could keep my old Home partition, so all my settings (bar the KDE ones) would stay, and I won't have to reinstall when 16.04 is finally released.

Installing took no time at all, as per previous releases, and the install went without a hitch. Upon rebooting I logged into the new KDE Plasma 5 desktop. By default on Nvidia cards 'buntu releases run using the open source Nouveau drivers, which are surprisingly good, apart from slightly fuzzy font rendering, but I could use it on my dual monitors fine while I sorted out getting the proprietary drivers installed. I tried installing the latest drivers manually using the PPA, but ended up with blank screens, until I remembered that my card is an old passive-cooled Geforce 210! Since Kubuntu's Driver Management Module doesn't see the old Legacy cards, I checked on NVidia's site which ones I needed, installed Synaptic, and looked for the nvidia-340 drivers. Once I installed them and rebooted all was well again. I then installed all my usual apps such as Gimp, Gmusicbrowser, Clementine, VLC etc. I also installed a couple of meta-packages, kubuntu-restricted-extras (for extra non-free codecs etc) and build-essential (for compiling apps).

The only remnants of my old settings I had to fix was some of the Places in Dolphin file manager were orphaned (since I changed the mount point of one of my drives) so it was just a case of editing those in the sidebar. Incidentally, I like the cleaned up look of Dolphin now, just remember that a lot of settings are now under the "Control" button.

My only slight problems are with virtual machines. Virtualbox won't install as it has dependency issues and (my admittedly old version of) VMWare Workstation needs patching again due to a newer kernel than it expects.I am sure these will be sorted at some point but it's not too much of a problem since I can always try VMs on my server (which has much more RAM anyway) and remote into them. Also I had to re-enable bash auto-completion which is not on by default for some reason.

I have changed the hideous Kubuntu default wallpaper for a couple of my favourites. It would be nice if KDE could span one wallpaper between two desktops, but KDE treats each workspace as separate. I have also tweaked the desktop/panel layout, switched the Desktop Theme from the default Breeze Light to Breeze Dark and installed Conky, so this is how my desktop looks now:

One thing I really love in Plasma 5 is the new Media Player widget, which now even recognises Gmusicbrowser, which it never did before, oh and the keyboard media buttons now actually work with Gmusicbrowser! Hovering over the widget on the panel shows artist/song info and album cover, clicking on the widget opens up the media controls. It might not seem like much but it's little things like this make things easier. Incidentally, Clementine player still uses a lot of resources - it is the top item in CPU and Memory usage in System Monitor, above Chrome!

 
The main thing I love about Kubuntu 16.04 is it's speed, it feels lightning fast compared to my old Mint KDE installation, even on a mechanical hard drive. Chrome feels really snappy, even with quite a few tabs open. Being a Daily build, there's a whole bunch of updates to install every day, when I login and even though it's still in beta, it is really stable, I've not had any application crashes yet, so hopefully it should be rock solid when it is finally released.

Update 6th March 2016
There's been a few little crashes, including once with Plasma desktop crashing and another with mouse settings, but nothing that a quick logout/login or reboot hasn't cured. Being a pre-release there are bound to be a few little bugs so I wouldn't recommend putting on mission critical situations until the final release, but at least there's not too long to wait.

HP Stream 11 - A Windows notebook that's not a "Chromebook killer"

So this is Microsoft's answer to Chromebooks, low spec laptops and "Windows 8.1 with Bing" - as if the mere adding of default IE defaulted to Bing search is anything to boast about. I'm sure most sensible users will install either Chrome or Firefox browsers anyway. This is the HP Stream 11 and the build of it looks quite similar to my HP Chromebook 14 but actually feels cheaper in the flesh. It has an 11.6-inch 1366×768 display and 2GB RAM, much like many Chromebooks. It has 2.16 GHz dual-core Intel Celeron N2840 Bay Trail processor, which is somewhat slower than the Haswell CPUs of many Chromebooks.

Some articles have called it a "Chromebook killer" but I think that's far from the truth. Even with it's 32GB SSD, more than most Chromebooks, it only has 17.5GB of free space, which will soon fill up with the detritus from Windows updates and registry bloat, aswell as all those apps the user will install. Advanced users could remove the Windows Restore partition to recover 7.2GB of storage. The user could just install only a few apps or not install any extra apps at all, and just use web apps, but then that would defeat the purpose of getting a Windows laptop, might aswell have bought a Chromebook in the first place. And the hardware with just 2GB RAM is not going to be much fun with anything more than light office work either.

The advantage of a Chromebook is even with meagre hardware it is much quicker than Windows on the same or similar hardware.  And you won't have to worry about intrusive updates (and their many reboots), viruses/malware and there's no overhead of a bloated OS. Even if there is a problem, it takes minutes to wipe the entire OS and restore your Chrome extensions and data. Windows boots in around 30 seconds out the box on the Stream 11, but given time I'd wager that time will only get longer and longer, whereas my Chromebook 14 boots from cold to in use in just 7 seconds, and will stay that way. Not that I often boot mine from cold, I use it all the time, shut the lid and then open it again later and it's connected and working in a second. I actually find it more convenient than waiting for my Nexus 7 to wake up.  

Chromebooks have been a massive hit both in schools and in the consumer market, judging by their appearance in Amazon's best selling laptop list. It is going to take more than cheap hardware and Bing to kill Chromebooks. I would only really recommend buying a HP Stream 11 if you absolutely positively have to use a lightweight native Windows app for something that cannot be done on a Chromebook!

Sources: ZDNet, Arstechnica, Amazon, HP

iPearl mCover HP Chromebook 14 Hard Shell Case Review

Since I happen to have had a "Coral Peach" HP Chromebook 14 bought for me, I decided I needed to tone it down a bit and have the added bonus of protecting it's bodywork too with a shell case that I found on Amazon UK. It's available in 9 different shades including clear, but I bought the black version since black goes with anything. It also kind of reminded me of the Apple BlackBook.

Naturally it arrived in a huge box with plenty of packaging. There was no instructions but it's fairly easy to work out how it goes on, there are clips around the lid and a lip along the bottom edge on the hinge side.

The bottom piece of the shell fits in a similar way but with larger clips on the corners and grill holes for cooling. It also has a couple of handy pull-down lugs at the rear that raises the laptop up on stilts, useful for those who like to have the keyboard angled more towards them, and also presumably to aid cooling, both intake and exhaust fans are on the base of the Chromebook. It has four big rubber feet to keep the laptop firmly rooted to the spot.

So far I am quite pleased with it, it does the job just fine, keeping my Chromebook in pristine condition, and avoids covering it with greasy finger marks that it so readily attracts.

If only it covered the rest of the pink bits! (Oo-errr!)  

My next accessory purchase will hopefully be a decent Bluetooth mouse, this one in particular hopefully:

Update 13th February 2016:

I have just removed the bottom part of the case as I have lost one of the rubber feet, the glue must have tried out a bit and the HP feels better on my laptop without the plastic cover. The HP Bluetooth mouse I bought died within a month or two for no obvious reason.