Any idea how to install DDE (Deepin Desktop Environment) on 19.10? Repo ppa:leaeasy/dde does not have a release for eoan. I want to toy around a bit with it on actual Nvidia accelerated hardware before scrapping the box and reinstalling LTS20.04
You could backup the entire system, install the newest Ubuntu version and then roll back if needed. You could also use VirtualBox, if you want to only “toy around” with it, anyway.
I already have it in VM (20.04DDE beta), I want to test it on actual GPU fueled hardware, as opposed to emulated VM. I am specifically looking to test real machine performance.
Then you have to install the new version and then test it. It would likely just distort the test if you would run a specific part of newer software in an older environment. This has been proven to fail, specifically on Ubuntu, where you can use specific software in one version whereas it does not work or works only really bad in older versions.
You may try downloading the .deb packages from the PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~leaeasy/+archive/ubuntu/dde/+packages
It is likely to take a lot of time and effort in installing all the dependencies. As @akito said, it would be easier to just install UbuntuDDE.
This looks like the right place to ask this question: how come the iso for UbuntuDDE installs MATE 16.04? The iso came from the website, which dropped it to my Google Drive. I downloaded it and mounted it with either Unetbootin on my Windows box or with Balena Etcher on my Linux box (wearing out my KVM doing several other things at the same time.) Did I miss something? Should I burn a DVD instead of a USB? Got any good ideas?
You could have asked it separately as well 
It doesn’t. I installed it and I see nothing of that sort.
Do you have Ubuntu MATE 16.04 ISO on your system? Sometime the disk burning tool automatically select one of the ISO files available.
Or maybe the source you downloaded from was not right?
The file is ubuntudde-remix-20.04-20200406-beta.iso. I’ll try burning a DVD to see if I get the same result.
It got too late to finish this last night. Using the ubuntudde.com website, I tried all three download sources: direct, source forge, and torrent. Every one of them opened with a ‘ubuntudde’ message, but proceeded to set up a live incidence of Ubuntu MATE 16.04. I sure couldn’t see any opportunity to make any other inputs or choices. The files were ubuntudde-2004-all.20200410.iso for the Google Drive, Torrent, and Sourceforge versions.
Where did you find the iso you installed? I used a virgin DVD and a formatted USB stick and booted directly from them. In 20 years of trying live distros I’ve only seen this once or twice.
I checked Synaptic Package Manager when I rebooted Kubuntu 20.04 beta (nice, by the way) but there’s no DDE Desktop Environment to overlay. Deepin has some nice features. I’d like to see them!