Man oh man oh man, Deepin 2014 looks absolutely amazing.  Only thing I'm not crazy about is the apple style dock.  hope devs improve on 2013 taskbar.  Even the installer looks amazing, spent 10 minutes drooling over the installer.  great work guys.       

The installer is excellent. The best I've used in many distros over the years.

I don't like the dock much either - nor do I like the fact that (Alpha release I acknowledge) that it now takes THREE clicks to shutdown/suspend/reboot and it now takes more than two clicks to get to the menus - although there is a favourites section (like Cinnamon) for apps used most often. The control panel is an interesting idea - I am undecided yet whether I think it is any better than the tradition and much cleaner window.

I admire the vision and effort put in by the team. I just wonder however, whether they have gone too far to the point that the excellent and efficient 2013 desktop has been scrapped in favour of a trendy touch screen approach. I am reminded of the first attempt at Unity when I look at 2014.

BUT it is early days and I remain living in hope - who knows some extra configuration options might be included later that will make all the difference.

Platypus

I tried the alpha and it seems to work nicely. I like the desktop but I agree that because the icons all look the same in the dock, it is difficult to know which is which easily. The plymouth boot screen is the coolest I've seen. Only problem I encountered is that animations like unminimize are mostly smooth but a few times, they are choppy, not smooth. I've made a thread about the issue. But mostly the first try was pleasant. I do not mind the new settings panel too much, It is good looking. I'm glad the approach is not flat style.

I used Unetbootin to select the ISO and selected the Hard Disk option as the place to write to. That made Unetbootin install a separate grub entry which I could use to try out the live media.

Alpha or not, I installed it. Its quite beautiful.
The installer is the simplest and the best I've seen for years.
There is a certain problem with this dock, i.e, the icons suddenly disappear from it. Also, there is no way (yet) to change places between icons. I like the Control Center, everything is there, except of course how to configure the dock.  There is also a certain lateness in opening a application, after the click on the icon on that dock. I have no idea what is this "d" icon on the dock, and what it should do--it doesn't do anything at the moment. These comments are for the devs. I am using it for the 4th day, and hope to use it for sometime.

I am sure Deepin 2014 would be a very nice distro, just like the earlier ones. I would be waiting for the final release, but would update and dist-upgrade it until then. I would be happy, if the devs would make it happen, so I don't have to download the final release, but have the upgraded one.

Cheers!

Deepin enthusiast to 'perfect' a custom desktop is what you are talking about! Would you like to talk about completing this task?
Cheers

I notice the old problem of 'space after apostrophe' remains in 2014. Even though it has been pointed out in this forum, nothing so far seems to have been done to fix the problem.

For example, look at Firefox Preferences under the Tabs option. The second from the bottom line in the list is an example. There is a space after the apostrophe. It seems that the font developer assume that a single close quote (same symbol as the apostrophe) always requires a space after it.

This says to me that the fallback English font doesn't handle the apostrophe problem. It is very annoying because to deal with this seems to involve 'fontconfig' which, from what I've read, has a language and mind of its own.  

Better minds than me can look at this. I acknowedge that the broader target audience of Deepin is for the Chinese market, but if the developer hope to access the European and English speaking world this issue needs to be addressed.

Regards,
Platypus

I remember they did something and I thought the issue no longer existed. :?
I'll going to tell the developers about it...again. This time by reporting it to the mighty Mantis for betting tracking： #0003208

I tried it and since the DE is awesome in and of itself but I'm wondering where I could make the following suggestions, and since it's alpha, maybe some of these are already on the pipeline. If these ideas aren't liked, it's ok, but here goes:
- If no global menu is the intention at least go towards using unity's locally integrated menus or going with the new headerbars like elementary and gnome are doing.
- Pretty please, can we have a notification center integrated in to the control/settings panel. That would be awesome.
- Please can we have dynamic workspaces like gnome-shell, elementary or cinnamon.
- These last two are just picky details, but a nice maximization animation would be nice and a prettier window overview a-la elementary OS.

Sorry if it's offensive to compare or suggest from other DE's, they're just nice things I though Deepin wouldn't mind having too.

- I don't really like global menus, but a notificaition center would be really nice.

- Printer settings in the control center and not only in launcher

- Ability to configure the launcher so it shows categories not favorites from the start

But oh well, it's still alpha and pretty dang nice 'till now

Regards,

corEr

Since I can't read the already filed bugs etc., I'll just gonna write here:

- Control Center- Display --> does show only one resolution, not all
- Dock can't switch the Icons around

Deepin 2014 - fully upgraded as on May 3rd, 2014

Regards,

corEr

Hello, this is our bug, please wait for repair.