Many thanks to the Spanish deepin community for their contribution to the open source cause. The following is reprinted from the Spanish deepin community team interview with the deepin team.

At this time, we would like to thank Jason Zhang, deepin’s Community Manager, for giving us the opportunity to interview Gary Wang. Member of the technical committee that manages the development of the deepin desktop, who is in charge of ensuring the quality and reliability of all the code in DDE.

We asked him about future goals for the distribution, we also inquired about specifics with the new Linglong format. Will there be a migration of the native applications to the new format? This and much more can be read in the interview below. Don't miss it, and don't forget to ask any questions you may have regarding the content of the interview.

What are the short and long-term goals and plans for the development of the deepin operating system?

In the Long-term, deepin will focus on many new things, such as providing a more refined Wayland. Providing improved support for user-level application permissions management in DDE. We are working to support new processor architectures in the near future.

As far as the deepin community is concerned, we plan to continue to improve the user and developer experience and encourage them to collaborate and contribute with us.

What can you tell us about the new Linglong package format, its advantages, and how it contributes to improving the deepin user experience?

It is container-based and has rootless sandbox support, in the future, we also plan to incorporate individual control over permissions. So users can feel more secure when running a Linglong-based application. In turn, for developers, these will support incremental upgrades and import/export support to save time on packaging.

Do you plan to migrate a large number of applications into the Linglong format? E.g. Wine, Kodi, VLC, GIMP, Steam; etc.

Yes, but not immediately, and we will not package all existing applications in Linglong format. Instead, we will suggest developers start porting applications into this format.

By the way, we also plan to port some non-free applications to Linglong (as far as licensing allows us to) but currently, we don't have a complete list of the applications we will port.

Users perceive that the base in deepin 23 Beta lacks many packages compared to Debian. Can we expect them to be replaced by Linglong versions at the time of the final Deepin 23 release?

Starting with deepin 23, all packages in the “still-under-construction” base will be maintained by contributors from the Deepin community. Therefore, all contributors will be able to submit and maintain one or more packages (if they are willing to do so).

There will be some applications that will switch to the Linglong version, but not all of them. And of course, the migration to this format is a long-term plan, so there won't be many such packages when the stable version is released.

Can you give us more details about atomic updates and the ability to revert these in case of a problem?

Atomic updates are an Ostree-based system version management program. Users or programs can call the “Commit” interface of the atomic update to take a snapshot of the current system and save it. The atomic update will generate a boot item in the Grub menu, which will serve to roll back the user to the previous version of the system snapshot in the Grub menu interface.

The atomic update function supports backing up the system multiple times in different time periods and adds a lot of protection to the current system during the backup and restore process.

deepin has been recognized for its focus on design and usability; what exciting improvements or features can we expect in the next release of Deepin and the DDE desktop?

Version 23 implements an aesthetic and functional redesign of the system (or shall we say DDE), called Flow Design (⾏云设计). The user interface will not change too much between the beta and the stable version.

What is deepin's approach in terms of user security and privacy, and what measures are being taken to ensure that personal data is protected?

Regarding the use of personal data, all core components in deepin have no telemetry at all and will only have access to the Internet if the main function requires it, so your data will always remain on your device.

Some optional components, however, such as deepin ID will need to use your data, as the function, requires it. For example, in the function of synchronizing your settings and bookmarks, then of course you must allow them to access and upload the settings and bookmarks file.

By the way, our commercial Linux distribution (UOS) may have telemetry, and therefore some deepin applications may contain inactive/orphan code related to this in the code base they share.

Logic is not enabled in our community distribution (deepin). We also invite all people to review our source code at Wuhan Deepin Technology Co.,LTD.

To ensure and improve the protection of personal data, we have plans to introduce a more detailed permission management function in both DDE and Linglong packages. Permission management at the DDE level will be based on the cgroup function of systemd, and Linglong packages will be sandboxed and are planned to offer more detailed control than those currently offered by Flatpak.

There will be permissions to allow access to user files, network-specific D-Bus services, certain device types, and other permissions that are controlled by the user. In this way, users will be protected against unauthorized access to their personal data and will be able to prevent malware access.

This permissions management feature is part of our efforts to strengthen the security and privacy of users in the deepin environment. We are committed to providing all our users with a secure and reliable experience. For any related inquiries, please contact us at [email protected].

Are there any official plans to offer compatibility with other devices or platforms in the near future?

In deepin 23 we added a user compatibility layer (DCM) based on Distrobox. In the immediate future, we don't have any more projects in development, but there are plans to offer direct support for some ARM platforms.

Can you estimate an approximate release date for the stable version of deepin 23?

We can give you the scoop that there will be a Beta 2 in the next few months, so it is very likely that the stable version will be released, most likely towards the end of 2023. For additional data, you can subscribe to our development mailing list at https://www.freelists.org/archive/deepin-devel/.

Finally, is there anything else you would like to share with the community of users and followers of deepin about the projects you are currently working on?

Currently, we are focusing on bug fixing in order to deliver a stable and reliable version. We are also working on a lot of changes so that community members/contributors can grow with deepin! If you are interested in the development of the project (and contributing), we suggest subscribing to our development mailing list (https://www.freelists.org/archive/deepin-devel/).

Lastly, we would like to say hi, and thank you, on behalf of the community and deepin en Español, for giving us the possibility to interact and collaborate with the Deepin family.

Thanks to you.

And that was the interview with Gary Wang. We hope it cleared up some of the doubts you had about the future of the distribution. And we thank deepin for granting us this exclusive interview.