Ubuntu users envious of Chinese Linux distro’s slickly-styled ‘Software Centre’ won’t nee to be green-eyed for too long: it’s coming to Ubuntu.
Aenon Sun, an employee of the company who support the Ubuntu-based distro, left me some answers to a number of burning questions about the app and plans for future versions on my Google+ profile.
I’ve shared the responses below.
On why the app store doesn’t ‘look’ like other typical desktop apps: –
“We once had a gtk+ version of Deepin Software Center half a year ago (version 0.02 or something) but the main developer thought it was too ugly so he decided to draw the window himself. We do know that some experienced users may hate this but at least it became much prettier and it’s not significantly slower on a modern machine.
On whether the application will be packaged up for Ubuntu users to install: –
The latest version of DSC supports English better than the one in LD 11.12 beta [the version we used in our article and video].
At present, there are still ( a number of ) translation errors in it. We will check carefully before releasing DSC 2.0 with LD 11.12 on 30th or 31st this month.
…we will also release packages for Debian (.deb files) and Ubuntu (with our PPA).
On the distribution itself: –
We will release a user guide of our distribution in our wiki and also in pdf files. We will work on the Chinese one first and the English version will come out later.
After we release Linux Deepin 11.12, we will redesign the website and make it more international. It will support simplified and traditional Chinese and also English.
The project stems back to Hiweed Linux.
The first public release Hiweed 0.7 was out in early 2004 and based on Debian (when Ubuntu had not published yet) with a XFCE environment.
Later, Hiweed 1.0 through 3.0 was based on Ubuntu yet still with XFCE (it’s not regarded as based on Xubuntu). At that time the only maintainer was Hiweed.
In 2009, Snd, Wmd and Huahua joined the project as testers and maintainers, and the name changed to Linux Deepin. “Deepin” is the other name of Snd and also his forum.
Since then, LD released two months after each Ubuntu version. 9.12 and 10.06 are based on XFCE while 10.10 and 11.06 are based on Gnome2.
Early 2011, more people joined the project and in September and company was founded to support LD. The company currently has about twenty people (including students working part-time) and there’re a Debian Maintainer, a Debian Developer and two Ubuntu Loco team members among us.“