UbuntuDDE: the tenth official Ubuntu flavor would arrive with Deepin

Just three years ago, Canonical was about to launch a new version of its operating system with a new member of its family. It was Ubuntu Budgie, an operating system that carried the label "Remix" until it became an official flavor. The same label carries Ubuntu Cinnamon, project that is working to enter the family. The same surname carries another project, that of UbuntuDDE, which might suggest that they are working towards becoming the XNUMXth brother.

We do not know if UbuntuDDE will become an official flavor. In fact, we know very little about a project that has just been born and whose twitter account He has only posted two tweets. The first has been to announce the first release in its history, which coincides with UbuntuDDE Remix 20.04 Focal Fossa Beta. We also know another piece of information, this one much more important: you will use the Deepin graphical environment, a modern and very interesting desktop for those who are tired of GNOME, Plasma or Budgie.

UbuntuDDE stands for Ubuntu Deepin Desktop Environment

The project has just launched its website, which you can access from this link. Thus, its developers would have decided to go the opposite way to Ubuntu Cinnamon, who began by telling us about their flavor and their plans before having a web page where they could peek into their ideas and what they had to offer us. As we have already mentioned, on the website they refer to the operating system as UbuntuDDE, which is the acronym for Ubuntu Deepin Desktop Environment, but in the details they add the label "Remix" that I have personally only seen in two Ubuntu flavors, one who became an official and another who is at it. Therefore, we are before what could be the tenth official Ubuntu flavorIf we add Ubuntu Cinnamon and take into account that Ubuntu GNOME ceased to exist after the release of Cosmic Cuttiefish (Ubuntu 18.10).

Taking into account the little information that there is in this regard, little more can be said. Yes we can mention some of the applications you use, like:

• Firefox as a web browser.
• Thunderbird as a mail and calendar manager.
• LibreOffice as an office suite.
• Deepin File Manager as a file manager. It has light and dark themes, but there is a bug that makes it not look very good when going from one to the other.
• Celluloid and mpv Media Player as multimedia players. Initially, it does not include any music software, such as Elisa or Rhythmbox.
• GIMP as an image editor.
• Lectern as a document viewer.
• Software (from Ubuntu) as a software store.
• GParted as a partition manager.

Available from April 23 in stable version

UbuntuDDE Remix 20.04 RemixBeta available en Google Drive and in Sourceforge. Taking into account that it is in beta phase and that it is still in its first steps, its installation on production equipment is not recommended, but we can see everything it has to offer in a virtual machine. The best we can do is use GNOME Boxes, the GNOME proposal that allows us to run Live ISOs on a larger screen than what VirtualBox offers us.

For our part, we will follow the evolution of the project and publish any interesting news about it. Probably one of the next is that they are dealing directly with Canonical.