Ok Deepin is more of a DE than a Linux distro so it can be installed on other distros too.
It is supposed to be a mix of Gnome 3 and Windows - but I am willing to give it a chance anyway.
It cannot be
that bad.
So I fire it up and notice that global lagnuages like Valhallian are not there but I can pick english - which is kind of good on a chinese distro.
If you speak German of French you can pick those too.
Then I am directly prompted for the user
Nice and easy so far....
The next button leads to the partitioning where I accepted the defaults and got nice "commercials" while I was waiting for it to finish.
Great quality and it does make the (long) wait less boring.
And that is it we are finished
Real easy even grandma can do it. Time to reboot then...
And we are brought directly to a nice login:
So far this has been a painless experience - and this is quite the "looker" too.
After we have logged in we are offered some tutorials which we can ignore if we want to.
Normally I ignore stuff like this but in the interest of newbie friendliness I clicked the start button and got nice no overkill info.
Easy to understand for Grandma too.
I do not have much love for "hot corners" because that idea clearly came to someone that had just smoked his socks, but it is nicely explained here.
I do detect the relationship with Gnome 3 which I have tried to like, without succeeding - I have thoroughly explained why
hereBut this tutorial is very good and teaches us to create groups on the desktop by dragging icons over each other and what the different hot corners will do ++.
That is newbie friendly.
So I start deepin and hit the rocket launcher (or the top left corner... arghh) and the apps turn up in the big Cellphone style that is so popular these days.
It is newbie friendly with bic pictures so you do not even have to be able to read.
Here I left the newbie part and opened the terminal and did a
and discovered that my norwegian keyboard was not set.
This is hardly surprising since I picked an english install (had too!).
So I go to the bottom right corner (arghh) and set my keyboard there:
I could change my locale and keyboard to the global Valhallian so this control panel works. The global letters; åøæÅØÆ are back
I do like that all the hot corners are also represented as icons in the menu so regardless of preferences; we do have a choice.
Another thing that newbies will not care about, is that Deepin uses ZSH instead of regular bash - but I like it
If you play around with the control panel you can change the look and feel quite a lot. There are some stunning wallpapers:
To update the system in a user/newbie friendly way we have to open the Deepin store
It looks kind of "Chinese" but I can see that there are 69 upgrades on the upgrade symbol on the top left.
So I click it and the system gets updated without cryptic apt-get's or aptitude's - that is newbie friendly.
The recommendations in the store are pretty much unknown to me and probably irresistible to the Chinese. In any case you will have the opportunity to get rid of money there if you like.
Or you can just use it to install free software and update your system.
It works and is pretty easy to use; the only thing I did not get was the "Go" button. I did not get the symbol, but it was on the top right where it usually is so it started my upgrade.
And after it has finished I am told so by a cute guy:
That is newbie friendly
There are lots of apps in the "shop" so you will probably not miss anything.
If you rightclick on the panel you can change the look and functionality.
Apparently I have been in "fashion mode" so far so I set it to "Efficient mode" and my Desktop looked like this:
If you pick the "classic mode" you will get pretty much the same with smaller icons and slimmer panels.
Deepin is pretty flexible and user friendly and makes a good and solid impression.
So yes - this is something that can be recommended to newbies together with Zorin, Mint and Mageia. But you don't have to be a newbie to use it - at all
sit thight 
