I used to work for the guy who pushed the original Qt acquisition at Nokia. He later on, after the Elopcalypse, moved to Huawei to head one of their R&D units.
Wouldn't be at all surprised if he and his teams had his palm prints all over this one. Custom media players certainly play to his history and strengths. (Shot in the dark: I will guess that the media player is built on GStreamer for the codec support and exposed through QtMultimedia elements.)
I wonder if the name's etymology has anything specific about it that could only be understood if you're versed in Chinese culture or Mandarin language?
After giving it some thought, I finally realized why it sounds so scary: Because of it's open-source nature, if there's anything suspicious in "deepin", it's likely to be ...deep in.
That's what I was thinking re scary. But I second your question if there's anything phonetically similar to "deep in" in Mandarin or other language spoken in China.
Dee-pin could be 2 Mandarin Chinese words or syllables, but my dictionary doesn't have a compound word including both.
The company behind it is named Wuhan Deepin Technology. On the Chinese website it's 武汉深之度科技有限公司.
Which doesn't contain the syllables dee-pin.
However the part that is called Deepin in English is 深之度 which literally translated could mean something like passing deep.
So it's probably actually English.
I'd leave this to someone with better Chinese skills though.
Interesting that you only mention copying on Huawei's part but not how Apple has copied features on their IPhones from Huawei and other Asian phone makers.
It does look like the latest iPhone is playing catch-up with its 3 cameras. Personally I prefer the design of the Huawei P30 Pro, though, so I'd say that Huawei has out-cooled Apple.
Well the latest iPhone has caught up to Philips shavers visually IMO. I'm not kidding, the distinctive "retro" look of it comes from associating that kind of design with the 1960s.
At least they don’t copy and then act like they were the originator like Apple does.
Apple even tried to trademark the term “app store”. They still listed as one of their registered trademarks even though they could never enforce it and iOS will still try to capitalize the words when you type them in.
Well if you're mentioning Huawei copying Apple designs, Huawei still has a lot to cover to match Apple copying, namely how Apple copied a lot BrAun. A lot.
Applying an existing design language to unrelated products is not the same as building a replica of an existing product. I'm aware of how Apple was often inspired by Braun, but nothing I've seen comes close to the way the Matebook copies the MacBook.
I guess that's an opinion valid as anyone who makes the case that a design language is bound to a brand identity - which is my stance.
It's a weird game, the "as long as functionality is different, it's ok to copy", when that's just a layer of a product. Why not apply that criteria to a form factor?
And yet the American human/civil rights record isn't nearly as bad as the Chinese one. I'm not a fan of either at all but if forced to choose I'll go with the former one.
Is America the same as China?
If you can't tell, here's food for thought:
How many people want to leave China to go live in America?
How many people want to leave America to go live in China?
>As for Deepin, its Chinese origins tend to ignite controversy (and anxiety within privacy purists) in the Linux world, however the distribution is open source and the code is available on GitHub.
Isn't this just plain racist? Is there any actual reason to believe that there's any privacy issues with Deepin, other that that it was made by Chinese people?
Not to mention that I've never heard this particular FUD before, so I'm doubtful that it "tends to ignite" anything.
I think it has to do with that China has a terrible human right's reputation (yet we all use Chinese products, so there's that), but mainly that Huawei is pretty much obliged by law to build backdoors and share any kind of information with the Chinese government if they are asked to do so.
Deepin isn't developed by Huawei, but I guess your point stands. Still, Deepin is a distribution that has been around for 15 years now, and it's completely open source. I don't think there's a legitimate reason to believe that Deepin is compromised in some way, which is the statement that was being made. At the very least there's no argument for that being made other than a vague reference to "its Chinese origins".
So does the US, I've yet to hear a valid argument on why the US is a better citizen on the global stage than China.
Domistically a very weak argument could be made that the US doesn't violate the rights of their own citizens as bad as China, but between FISA courts, the NSA and programs like PRISM (which is more than a decade old now), this argument barely makes sense.
Well, for one, whoever's running the US gets changed after two terms, sometimes it's a pity, sometimes it couldn't happen fast enough.
But in my opinion, it's definitely better than having the same person running things for who-knows how long, regardless of the integrity of that person.
A couple dozen people change at the top but literally everyone else stays on, including all the criminals in military and intelligence. It's an absolute joke.
Does it suck that the US persecutes a few thousand people via abuse of sigint? Yes. Does it suck more that Chinese Communist Part terrorizes millions? Yes.
Does the US persecute Black people worse than CCP persecutes anyone, for non-"privacy" reasons? Maybe.
There's still democratic oversight in the US to a much larger degree, and also many US companies are not playing ball in terms of encryption backdoors etc. Apple is one example.
Deepin has been around for a while now, and the questions about its origins have been around since the beginning. I'd say those questions have as much legitimacy as the similar questions surrounding Huawei.
You really don't need to start throwing accusations like 'racism' around, just because you're ignorant of the context involved.
I'll again quote the point that is being made:
>As for Deepin, its Chinese origins tend to ignite controversy (and anxiety within privacy purists) in the Linux world
This is, at the very least, pure FUD. The implication is that Deepin is untrustworthy because of its Chinese origins. If that's true, then the implication is that everything of Chinese origin is untrustworthy.
Deepin has indeed been around for a while. It is, as far as I can see, fully open source. Is there any indication that it's doing anything shady? Would a shady distribution last for 15 years in the privacy-conscious, code-scrutinizing Linux world?
Even if there are genuine indications that Deepin is shady, I wish the article had just mentioned those, rather than vaguely gesturing at its Chinese origins as if it's obvious to anyone that anything Chinese is suspicious. That's what I think is racist.
I've no problem consuming Chinese consumables, but software is another issue.
If some software from the US or EU was up to no good, I can use the law to bring them to court. In China, I'd first need to ask myself, if not maybe the lawmakers themselves requested the software to do no good.
EDIT: The same could also be said for US/EU governments, yes, but it is more subtle here (i.e. they label you a criminal/terrorist to legitimate installing e.g. a trojan on your PC, whereas, if I'm not mistaken, in China they could just make it a law to have trojans installed on every PC), so I still feel like the law somewhat protects my rights.
You seem obsessed with laws, as if they possess value and worth in and of themselves, when really they are a very high latency side channel of society and power.[a]
> I can use the law to bring them to court.
I wouldn't be so certain of that. There are two issues with this:
1. The no good would have to be illegal either in the civil sense for you to take them to court, or illegal in the criminal or regulatory sense for government to act. Obviously not all no good is codified in law.
2. Law is necessarily high latency - it requires the no good to have already taken place in order for action to be taken against the doers of no good
> i.e. they label you a criminal/terrorist to legitimate installing e.g. a trojan on your PC
This has its own issues:
1. the terrorist label will be applied unilaterally: no one is going to come and ask you if you're a terrorist before you get closer scrutiny.
2. It would be a mistake to think some form of constitution is going to help, in the long run. Laws can be changed. Even the US Constitution has amendments.
We're all only ever a few unhinged politicians away from no good governance.
Yes, quite true that me as an average individual basically stands no chance against the law in neither the US or EU, but big companies, powerful individuals, NGOs, the media or even a favorable judge can sway.
Also, consider how much harder it is to change the constitution here compared to China.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that power is more balanced in the Western world compared to China, and I consider that a good thing.
...but it does have its faults too, e.g. I find it appalling how slow politics, the economy and citizens react to the impending climate disaster. And yet, I'd still pick this world in which we'd have to fight each other over water and oxygen to a world run by totalitarian governments. And I hope I am exaggerating...
> but big companies, powerful individuals, NGOs, the media or even a favorable judge can sway
I'm going to agree with your wider point that power does appear to be more balanced in the West than China, at least until such times as a few more unhinged politicians have their way, but I also want to point out that...
The world over, big companies, powerful individuals, and the media, have much closer ties to government than you and I ever will.
Yes, true, but we have to hope that there are always at least two companies/individuals/media outlets, both with close ties to the government, but opposed to each other.
Do we really need to discuss whether a democracy, with an elected parliament and leaders, seperation of legislative/executive/judicative power, etc. has more power balance?
> untrustworthy because of its Chinese origins ... everything of Chinese origin is untrustworthy
Settle down there Satan.
My Chinese made coat hangers aren't much of a risk
This has nothing to do with anyone's Han-Chinese-ness, don't be ridiculous.
It's entirely about Chinese-Communist-Party-ness, government influence.
All governments are doing everything they can to spy on each other, that's a known quality. The CCP probably has a greater ability quantitatively due to China being a significant manufacturer of devices that could present risks.
We're right to ask these questions and attempt to examine the chain-of-trust.
Nope. When people say "Chinese origins", they mean it is designed in People's Republic of China, which many people distrust for political reasons. If it was designed in Taiwan or Singapore, which are also populated by Chinese, it would be called "Taiwanese" or "Singaporean" origin, and would not make any controversy at all.
Chinese or Chinese government policy? That's not the same. Also there is no need to try to come up with contrived examples or straw man arguments.
Claiming that "it's not against the Chinese but against their government" is also sometimes a convenient and not completely honest way to deflect claims of racism. The same happens with Israel and it can be quite insiduous.
When people have to notice and discuss the Chinese origin of everything, all the time, "but just because of the Chinese government's policies" in my view they complain too much...
And when it's not the government, it's pollution, or IP theft, or because they eat dogs (in some part of the country), or whatnot.
> If the people of Hong Kong don't want to be extradicted to China is that racist?
Could we avoid straw man arguments?
There is an element of racism on issues related to China. There is no point denying it.
There is certainly less of it (or at least it is much less obvious) than during the anti-China campaign in the West/US during the 50s and 60s but it is still there.
As I wrote, some people just complain too much... It's quite obvious in this thread.
I'm fairly sure the racism argument was the first strawman in this thread. Chinese software has some real trust issues, given the political climate in that country. Open source does not automatically mean it's safe.
You've ignored what I wrote in my comments and just replied beside the point by repeating the usual FUD instead.
A comment with similar contents as yours but "pro-China" would immediately be labelled as coming from a 'bot' or someone paid by the Chinese government.
I find this fascinating. The current climate regarding China is fantastic book material for Noam Chomsky.
Could we avoid misusing the term straw man argument? That seemed like a good faith hypothetical question that could help further illuminate your own position, not some false posturing of your ideas.
It must be nice to live in a world where geopolitical issues don't exist. The threat of the Chinese government is very real, and their influence and power over every Chinese citizen and company makes any Chinese actor suspect, yes. It has nothing to do with disliking Chinese, and everything to do with the CCP using its power to influence and control everything in their reach.
Edit: I'd like to add. There are so many conflicts and animosities and distrust that have zero to do with racism. Our troubles with Russia are entirely ideological, for example. And especially in geopolitics, the issues that cause conflict usually revolve around pragmatic things like resources, economic/military power, spheres of influence, etc.
As I said, I don't see any racism here. Being suspicious towards people of Chinese origin, culture, language, looks etc. is clearly racist. Being suspicious to the citizens of People's Republic of China is only political.
Shouldn't that be "nationalist" or "jingoist"? Chinese citizens aren't all one race (though the official Party line seems to suggest they should be, and policies like they're unleashing in Xinjiang and Tibet seem to be trying to achieve that by force).
Those attempts at denying that because a country or a people are not "a race" is ludicrous.
If I say that I don't like Mexicans that's racist, for example. If I try to deny it because that's not "a race" I will only ridiculise myself even more.
Sure, I understand what you're saying (and racism and jingoism are pretty hard to separate in practice). Clearly most private citizens anywhere in the world (outside of China...) don't have much to worry about using Huawei hardware, and if these laptops run Deepin they could easily have any other distro installed instead, if people are worried about the software.
So do you want to say that when some countries impose sanctions on, say, Iran, it's racist because there are nice people in Iran, and sanctions affect them as well?
Or it is not racists when governments do it, but is racists when individuals/companies do it?
I didn't say it's _fair_, I just said it's not racist.
It's probably too much to put ordinary people under suspicion right away, but for for legal bodies it's totally reasonable if you ask me. To assume that you can run business in an authoritarian country and be totally independent from the government is plainly naive. Even if you are not formally a member of the ruling party.
In the United States, the media has done a great job in portraying China as a thief of secrets. Over the years, there's been numerous stories of Chinese hackers stealing government info, spyware on Lenovo laptops, or Huawei employees attempting to steal samples and prototypes. I'm sure we do stuff just as bad, but I'm ashamed to admit that I'm hesitant to adopt a device that came from a Chinese company now.. which is what I think that statement is referring to.
The CCP requires by law that companies operating in China share their data with the police/government.
Funny enough, I remember reading an article on Hackernews yesterday about how Firefox should not include DoH by default because one of the reasons being privacy concerns about data being sent to cloudflare, in the US.
I don't think this has anything to do with racism and shouldn't be treated as such. Privacy should be a legitimate concern.
Nope. Look at Intel, NVidia, TSMC and GloFo. Final assembly board-stuffing maybe in China, but that's unlikely to be the source of major (high-gate-count) components.
( @dang is there a reason this users recent comments are dead? I had a quick look through the comment history and all the comments seem to be in good faith).
I wanted to ask the same question. He wrote a sensible comment that was very hard to read (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067221). I upvoted some of his recent comments, maybe it helps.
Linux is not inherently compliant (and Deepin isn't AFAIK), but it is entirely possible to package a distribution which is and submit it for certification.
> Huawei can address the security concerns by using established open source software (which they seem to have).
If you don't trust the entity publishing the binaries, then having it simply publishing sourcecode is not a way for you to gain confidence because there is no practical way to be sure that the binaries they deliver are the published code compiled by a non-modified version of an opensource compiler.
They have to provide a way to do reproducible builds.
Why not just use a stock Linux distro, and maybe just change the wallpaper to something Huawei-specific? Add a desktop shortcut to some special Huawei-specific app store, if they want, but keeping the OS stock pretty much signals that they really couldn't care less about putting in bloatware, backdoors, malware or similar, which would be a very welcome change in the OEM equipment world.
I'd suggest Ubuntu, because of it's popularity and non-tech-user-friendliness, then again I'm not sure if they're allowed to do that, since Canonical Ltd. and Trump, thus, depsite open-source, possibly also requires special licenses, IDK (e.g. I once wanted to install OpenSUSE and then there was something in the licensing agreement about EAR directives from the US, so I cancelled that).
I've never heard of Deepin Linux, is it popular in mainland China?
Apart from that, there've always been a steady stream of Laptops available with Linux, it's not a novelty item... many of those that are advertised as "non-OS" often have some form of Linux bundled in, just in case.
The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.
The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, is an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
Linux is the best thing that has happened for China and Russia. It helps them escape the Microsoft/Apple/Google control. Even North Korea has its own linux distro to avoid US software. Desktop linux will be a reality.
This is the 'Fusion power is just around the corner' of the computing world. There's only one way Desktop Linux succeeds, and that's that all the other Desktop OSs are abandoned or drive themselves into the dirt the way Win10 seems intent on doing.
What's your point? Running Linux optionally in a VM isn't what people mean when they talk about Desktop Linux. Neither is homebrew (which is Linux how, exactly?). ChromeOS is on Chromebooks, which are explicitly not desktops because their whole design is as a web kiosk.
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I don't consider Deepin desktop env more beautiful than Plasma, Budgie, Cinnamon or Gnome. This title is very clickbaity, so many distros are have this strage names Clear Linux, Scientific Linux, Beautiful Linux, Stupidly Easy Linux etc. You'd never know how "deep in" the article you will find relevant information.
I am not at the point where I care about a "beautiful" Linux on a laptop, I'd be happy with twm and Motif widgets if only the hardware would be 100% supported and everything would work.
For a reference point, a vanilla Ubuntu LTS install on random (non-certified) T-series ThinkPads still doesn't always suspend/wake up properly, doesn't hibernate properly, crashes X when used with a docking station, has issues with Bluetooth headsets (no microphone), has issues selecting the output audio device, doesn't support the fingerprint reader (I think), has hiccups with external screens, and altogether less battery life than in Windows. (I'm sure some of these work on other models and others have workarounds, this is just my recent experience with trying to run Linux without spending time on tweaks).
I would seriously consider switching my work machine to any laptop/distro combination that would get closer to the experience one has on MacOS (not perfect, but close enough to be productive), no matter where it was made.
I've been using Toshiba for the past 10 years. At one point, they ensured that every single model they made worked with Linux (although some needed some extra drivers). I suspect that is no longer the case, but I've still had good success.
I'm in Japan, so I buy Japanese models. I'm just about to buy a GZ73-JL (PGZ73JL-NNB to be precise). I expect it to work out of the box with Arch Linux. If it doesn't, I'll feel terrible about posting this :-) The PV63PSP-KHA that I've been using for the last 5 years has been practically flawless.
However, there are some caveats wrt the issue mention. Bluetooth is a tyre fire as far as I can tell. Some devices will work fine and some won't. The problem is mainly that most devices don't implement the standard. They only implement enough to work on Windows and/or Mac. On top of that, I'm sad to say that the Linux Bluetooth code is really hard to work with -- I've tried to debug non-working equipment (hey -- I've got source code!) and it's not fun.
I've never tried, but it seems that some fingerprint readers will not work on Linux. That's because they encrypt their output and they don't offer Linux drivers -- so there is no way to support them. I don't know which ones work and which don't.
Battery life is not bad on Linux if you have an Intel box and you use powertop. Powertop is a utility made by Intel for setting the battery settings optimally for your machine. You need to run it as root, go to the adjustment section and set everything to "Good". Normally that will be fine, but because there is a variety of different hardware out there, sometimes you can have some stability issues, so it's a good idea to manually set it when you boot up for the first few times until you can make sure there are no problems. Then you can save the settings and they will be set like that permanently.
Personally, I don't like Ubuntu any more -- I find the extra effort setting up Arch is worth the hassle. It's really only ever done once, especially since it's a rolling distro. I find that Ubuntu makes a lot of assumptions about what you are going to want and usually those assumptions are poor in my case. Many of my colleagues disagree.
Speaking of colleagues, several of them use Dell XPS 13 machines and have similarly little problems, so I can recommend that as well.
I use a Toshiba portege x20w and have very little issues as well for basic drivers, but any more specific hardware (windows hello, convertible laptop features, etc) tend not to work out of the box. Still much less of a hassle to setup than some laptop brands but definitely not Linux certified.
I think this is the thing that confuses people. I don't expect things like Windows Hello (facial recognition system for login) or convertible laptop features to ever work on Linux. I'm pretty careful not to spend extra money on a machine with those kinds of features. It seems like common sense to me, but that's really just because I have a pretty good idea of what Linux supports and what it doesn't.
Can confirm, the fingerprint reader is apparently a huuuge pain to set up. I had found an article on how to set it up and it was requiring me to boot into Windows to do the initial set up and then go to Ubuntu to be able to use it. I just went for a stronger password instead.
I thought in recent years the Linux device driver situation has much improved, and I think perhaps the vanilla Linux kernel has more drivers bundled in than the stock windows. Of course the GPU drivers are a bit troublesome to get the hardware acceleration working, but basic video I find gets set up without issue.
I currently have an X1 Yoga (3rd), where Lenovo messed up modern standby on both windows and linux. Luckily they have since added standard S3 as an option in the UEFI settings.
Everything else works out of the box except the fingerprint reader. Battery life is comparable.
> I would seriously consider switching my work machine to any laptop/distro combination that would get closer to the experience one has on MacOS
In my experience hackintoshes are pretty annoying and quite far from "close enough to be productive" out of the box. Or were you comparing with a laptop where your OS of choice is preinstalled? Then "without spending time on tweaks" is trivially true; someone else did that for you already.
To clarify, I was talking about the experience you get using MacOS on a Mac, definitely not a Hackintosh. Of course this is due to Apple (in most part) fully supporting all (their) hardware.
3:2 aspect ratio on the matebook x! I have said for quite some time that I would wait with buying a laptop until someone else than MS had that aspect ratio. I guess this means I will be getting a new laptop.
120 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThe main devs are Chinese and iirc, ZTE is funding their effort. Based on Debian with a beautiful new DE based on Qt.
I used to work for the guy who pushed the original Qt acquisition at Nokia. He later on, after the Elopcalypse, moved to Huawei to head one of their R&D units.
Wouldn't be at all surprised if he and his teams had his palm prints all over this one. Custom media players certainly play to his history and strengths. (Shot in the dark: I will guess that the media player is built on GStreamer for the codec support and exposed through QtMultimedia elements.)
After giving it some thought, I finally realized why it sounds so scary: Because of it's open-source nature, if there's anything suspicious in "deepin", it's likely to be ...deep in.
The company behind it is named Wuhan Deepin Technology. On the Chinese website it's 武汉深之度科技有限公司.
Which doesn't contain the syllables dee-pin.
However the part that is called Deepin in English is 深之度 which literally translated could mean something like passing deep. So it's probably actually English.
I'd leave this to someone with better Chinese skills though.
Apple even tried to trademark the term “app store”. They still listed as one of their registered trademarks even though they could never enforce it and iOS will still try to capitalize the words when you type them in.
It's a weird game, the "as long as functionality is different, it's ok to copy", when that's just a layer of a product. Why not apply that criteria to a form factor?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Isn't this just plain racist? Is there any actual reason to believe that there's any privacy issues with Deepin, other that that it was made by Chinese people? Not to mention that I've never heard this particular FUD before, so I'm doubtful that it "tends to ignite" anything.
Domistically a very weak argument could be made that the US doesn't violate the rights of their own citizens as bad as China, but between FISA courts, the NSA and programs like PRISM (which is more than a decade old now), this argument barely makes sense.
But in my opinion, it's definitely better than having the same person running things for who-knows how long, regardless of the integrity of that person.
Does the US persecute Black people worse than CCP persecutes anyone, for non-"privacy" reasons? Maybe.
You really don't need to start throwing accusations like 'racism' around, just because you're ignorant of the context involved.
Deepin has indeed been around for a while. It is, as far as I can see, fully open source. Is there any indication that it's doing anything shady? Would a shady distribution last for 15 years in the privacy-conscious, code-scrutinizing Linux world?
Even if there are genuine indications that Deepin is shady, I wish the article had just mentioned those, rather than vaguely gesturing at its Chinese origins as if it's obvious to anyone that anything Chinese is suspicious. That's what I think is racist.
If some software from the US or EU was up to no good, I can use the law to bring them to court. In China, I'd first need to ask myself, if not maybe the lawmakers themselves requested the software to do no good.
EDIT: The same could also be said for US/EU governments, yes, but it is more subtle here (i.e. they label you a criminal/terrorist to legitimate installing e.g. a trojan on your PC, whereas, if I'm not mistaken, in China they could just make it a law to have trojans installed on every PC), so I still feel like the law somewhat protects my rights.
> I can use the law to bring them to court.
I wouldn't be so certain of that. There are two issues with this:
1. The no good would have to be illegal either in the civil sense for you to take them to court, or illegal in the criminal or regulatory sense for government to act. Obviously not all no good is codified in law.
2. Law is necessarily high latency - it requires the no good to have already taken place in order for action to be taken against the doers of no good
> i.e. they label you a criminal/terrorist to legitimate installing e.g. a trojan on your PC
This has its own issues:
1. the terrorist label will be applied unilaterally: no one is going to come and ask you if you're a terrorist before you get closer scrutiny.
2. It would be a mistake to think some form of constitution is going to help, in the long run. Laws can be changed. Even the US Constitution has amendments.
We're all only ever a few unhinged politicians away from no good governance.
a. This quote was taken from @revelation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033481
Also, consider how much harder it is to change the constitution here compared to China.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that power is more balanced in the Western world compared to China, and I consider that a good thing.
...but it does have its faults too, e.g. I find it appalling how slow politics, the economy and citizens react to the impending climate disaster. And yet, I'd still pick this world in which we'd have to fight each other over water and oxygen to a world run by totalitarian governments. And I hope I am exaggerating...
I'm going to agree with your wider point that power does appear to be more balanced in the West than China, at least until such times as a few more unhinged politicians have their way, but I also want to point out that...
The world over, big companies, powerful individuals, and the media, have much closer ties to government than you and I ever will.
Because if we don’t continually reflect on that balance of power, and the civil society institutions necessary to support it, we will loss it.
That's entirely the case. Just because you keep trying to spin it as racist doesn't make it so.
Settle down there Satan.
My Chinese made coat hangers aren't much of a risk
This has nothing to do with anyone's Han-Chinese-ness, don't be ridiculous.
It's entirely about Chinese-Communist-Party-ness, government influence.
All governments are doing everything they can to spy on each other, that's a known quality. The CCP probably has a greater ability quantitatively due to China being a significant manufacturer of devices that could present risks.
We're right to ask these questions and attempt to examine the chain-of-trust.
There's no need to get hysterical about it.
Nope. When people say "Chinese origins", they mean it is designed in People's Republic of China, which many people distrust for political reasons. If it was designed in Taiwan or Singapore, which are also populated by Chinese, it would be called "Taiwanese" or "Singaporean" origin, and would not make any controversy at all.
Claiming that "it's not against the Chinese but against their government" is also sometimes a convenient and not completely honest way to deflect claims of racism. The same happens with Israel and it can be quite insiduous.
When people have to notice and discuss the Chinese origin of everything, all the time, "but just because of the Chinese government's policies" in my view they complain too much...
And when it's not the government, it's pollution, or IP theft, or because they eat dogs (in some part of the country), or whatnot.
> a convenient but not completely honest way to deflect claims of racism
And sometimes claims of racism can be a convenient but not quite honest way to deflect criticism of policy.
Could we avoid straw man arguments?
There is an element of racism on issues related to China. There is no point denying it.
There is certainly less of it (or at least it is much less obvious) than during the anti-China campaign in the West/US during the 50s and 60s but it is still there.
As I wrote, some people just complain too much... It's quite obvious in this thread.
We can - but that wasn't a straw-man argument.
> There is an element of racism on issues regarding China.
I agree. There is also an element of "that's racist" being used to deflect criticism.
A comment with similar contents as yours but "pro-China" would immediately be labelled as coming from a 'bot' or someone paid by the Chinese government.
I find this fascinating. The current climate regarding China is fantastic book material for Noam Chomsky.
Edit: I'd like to add. There are so many conflicts and animosities and distrust that have zero to do with racism. Our troubles with Russia are entirely ideological, for example. And especially in geopolitics, the issues that cause conflict usually revolve around pragmatic things like resources, economic/military power, spheres of influence, etc.
Being negative about people simply based on their nationality is racist.
Those attempts at denying that because a country or a people are not "a race" is ludicrous.
If I say that I don't like Mexicans that's racist, for example. If I try to deny it because that's not "a race" I will only ridiculise myself even more.
Or it is not racists when governments do it, but is racists when individuals/companies do it?
It's probably too much to put ordinary people under suspicion right away, but for for legal bodies it's totally reasonable if you ask me. To assume that you can run business in an authoritarian country and be totally independent from the government is plainly naive. Even if you are not formally a member of the ruling party.
Try doing the reverse in China, I'm sure half of HN's userbase would have received an unwelcome visit from the local cops by now...
https://www.deepin.org/en/2018/04/14/linux-deepin-is-not-spy...
Funny enough, I remember reading an article on Hackernews yesterday about how Firefox should not include DoH by default because one of the reasons being privacy concerns about data being sent to cloudflare, in the US.
I don't think this has anything to do with racism and shouldn't be treated as such. Privacy should be a legitimate concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepin#Reception
Huawei can address the security concerns by using established open source software (which they seem to have).
Would be great to have an alternative to the windows/mac duopoly.
Linux is not inherently compliant (and Deepin isn't AFAIK), but it is entirely possible to package a distribution which is and submit it for certification.
If you don't trust the entity publishing the binaries, then having it simply publishing sourcecode is not a way for you to gain confidence because there is no practical way to be sure that the binaries they deliver are the published code compiled by a non-modified version of an opensource compiler.
They have to provide a way to do reproducible builds.
https://reproducible-builds.org/
There is also a huge challenge when it comes to enable the customer to audit the hardware.
I'd suggest Ubuntu, because of it's popularity and non-tech-user-friendliness, then again I'm not sure if they're allowed to do that, since Canonical Ltd. and Trump, thus, depsite open-source, possibly also requires special licenses, IDK (e.g. I once wanted to install OpenSUSE and then there was something in the licensing agreement about EAR directives from the US, so I cancelled that).
I've never heard of Deepin Linux, is it popular in mainland China?
Apart from that, there've always been a steady stream of Laptops available with Linux, it's not a novelty item... many of those that are advertised as "non-OS" often have some form of Linux bundled in, just in case.
That's quite a shot to stardom, and yet, judging from the replies, I don't seem to be the only one who's never heard of it.
Still, I'd be interested to know, how Deepin is doing in China, is it comparable to Ubuntu in the Western world?
> They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.
https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.
https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
Agree. It's a trending barometer. Given that Deepin is in the news now because of Huawei, we can expect a few more hits on their distrowatch page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
It is.
This is the 'Fusion power is just around the corner' of the computing world. There's only one way Desktop Linux succeeds, and that's that all the other Desktop OSs are abandoned or drive themselves into the dirt the way Win10 seems intent on doing.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the not too far future also macOS or iOS ship with some version of homebrew or macports included out of the box.
Also your notion of chromebooks is about a decade out of date.
For a reference point, a vanilla Ubuntu LTS install on random (non-certified) T-series ThinkPads still doesn't always suspend/wake up properly, doesn't hibernate properly, crashes X when used with a docking station, has issues with Bluetooth headsets (no microphone), has issues selecting the output audio device, doesn't support the fingerprint reader (I think), has hiccups with external screens, and altogether less battery life than in Windows. (I'm sure some of these work on other models and others have workarounds, this is just my recent experience with trying to run Linux without spending time on tweaks).
I would seriously consider switching my work machine to any laptop/distro combination that would get closer to the experience one has on MacOS (not perfect, but close enough to be productive), no matter where it was made.
I'm in Japan, so I buy Japanese models. I'm just about to buy a GZ73-JL (PGZ73JL-NNB to be precise). I expect it to work out of the box with Arch Linux. If it doesn't, I'll feel terrible about posting this :-) The PV63PSP-KHA that I've been using for the last 5 years has been practically flawless.
However, there are some caveats wrt the issue mention. Bluetooth is a tyre fire as far as I can tell. Some devices will work fine and some won't. The problem is mainly that most devices don't implement the standard. They only implement enough to work on Windows and/or Mac. On top of that, I'm sad to say that the Linux Bluetooth code is really hard to work with -- I've tried to debug non-working equipment (hey -- I've got source code!) and it's not fun.
I've never tried, but it seems that some fingerprint readers will not work on Linux. That's because they encrypt their output and they don't offer Linux drivers -- so there is no way to support them. I don't know which ones work and which don't.
Battery life is not bad on Linux if you have an Intel box and you use powertop. Powertop is a utility made by Intel for setting the battery settings optimally for your machine. You need to run it as root, go to the adjustment section and set everything to "Good". Normally that will be fine, but because there is a variety of different hardware out there, sometimes you can have some stability issues, so it's a good idea to manually set it when you boot up for the first few times until you can make sure there are no problems. Then you can save the settings and they will be set like that permanently.
Personally, I don't like Ubuntu any more -- I find the extra effort setting up Arch is worth the hassle. It's really only ever done once, especially since it's a rolling distro. I find that Ubuntu makes a lot of assumptions about what you are going to want and usually those assumptions are poor in my case. Many of my colleagues disagree.
Speaking of colleagues, several of them use Dell XPS 13 machines and have similarly little problems, so I can recommend that as well.
https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/models?vendors=Leno...
I currently have an X1 Yoga (3rd), where Lenovo messed up modern standby on both windows and linux. Luckily they have since added standard S3 as an option in the UEFI settings. Everything else works out of the box except the fingerprint reader. Battery life is comparable.
> I would seriously consider switching my work machine to any laptop/distro combination that would get closer to the experience one has on MacOS
In my experience hackintoshes are pretty annoying and quite far from "close enough to be productive" out of the box. Or were you comparing with a laptop where your OS of choice is preinstalled? Then "without spending time on tweaks" is trivially true; someone else did that for you already.