Deepin

deepin (Chinese: 深度操作系统; pinyin: Shēndù Cāozuò-xìtǒng; formerly known as Linux Deepin and Hiweed Linux) is a Linux distribution. It features the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE), built on Qt and available for a variety of distributions. The Deepin userbase is predominantly Chinese, though DDE is in most prominent Linux distributions' repositories as an alternative desktop environment. The company behind the development, Deepin Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of UnionTech (统信软件), is based in Wuhan, China.

The distribution began in 2004 as Hiweed Linux. In 2011, the development team behind Deepin established a company named Deepin Technology to support commercial development of the operating system. The company received business investments the same year it was founded.

Deepin Technology joined the Linux Foundation in 2015. In 2019, Huawei started to ship Linux laptops pre-installed with Deepin.

The South China Morning Post reported that Chinese microprocessor company Loongson created a partnership in 2020 with UnionTech and Sunway to develop and promote the Deepin operating system in order to reduce Chinese dependency on Microsoft Windows.

Deepin introduced a new package manager called "linglong" in 2022.

In 2024, Deepin integrated AI into its (new) IDE, photo editing, search (now called "Grand Search"), and two new chatbot assistants: one for general knowledge and one for knowledge on Deepin.

In June 2024, Deepin announced it was joining the "Prosperity 2036" initiative, whose goal was to establish an open-standard system and open-source software stack based on RISC-V, enabling RISC-V hardware and software "to be recognized as a mainstream instruction set architecture" by 2036.

Starting with the release of Version 23 in August 2024, Deepin began to provide improved hardware support for processor architectures other than x86: install media and packages for ARM64 and RISC-V processors were added to the existing support for x86 and LoongArch.