Created and maintained by Chinese developers, deepin has long been considered one of the prettiest Linux-based operating systems. Understandably, due to its development happening in China, many people do not trust the distribution — especially with biometrics being added. Not to mention the recent dustup over Taiwan and apparent ongoing genocide.

If you are someone that trusts deepin despite its country of origin, however, I have some really exciting news. Today, an official public preview of the upcoming deepin 23 becomes available for download. The developers highlight the inclusion of the new “Linglong” package format, atomic updates, and new repositories.

“Linglong is a new package format developed by deepin, aiming at solving various compatibility problems caused by complex dependencies of traditional package formats under Linux, and reducing the security risks caused by decentralized control of permissions. It is available to any Linux distribution, supports incremental updates of applications, managing, distributing, and sandboxing apps, which not only improves ease of use, but also greatly protects user privacy,” explains the deepin development team.

The developers further explain, “The atomic update is a new idea for system updates, which regards system updates as atomic operations – if packages are installed successfully, system updates are finished; if system updates fail, the system can be reverted to the previous version with no changes, which effectively avoid the trouble that some dependencies are installed but the system is not fully upgraded. Atomic updates do not rely on system installation methods and specific partitions and support system rollback after an upgrade.”

The devs share a surprisingly short changelog below.

• Added new wallpapers
• Built brand-new repositories
• Added HWE 5.18 kernel
• Added support for atomic updates and system rollback
• Added support for the new Linglong package format
• Offered some Linglong applications 

As always, you should never install a pre-release operating system on a production machine. Instead, it would be wise to test deepin 23 Preview using a spare computer or as a virtual machine. You can download an ISO here now.

Image credit: Jayjaynaenae/depositphotos.com