Peppermint 10
32-bit
peppermint is a lightweight Linux distribution based on the ever-popular Linux Mint. While the lightweight LXDE desktop, and the fact it’s 32-bit, make it ideal for older hardware, it aims to be useful to all sorts. The choice of desktop ensures it runs as fast as hardware allows, and your memory won’t be all used before you’ve even opened a file manager.
Speaking of such, Peppermint uses Cinnamon’s Nemo, which is somewhat more fully featured than LXDE’S PCMANFM. For similar reasons it uses Xfce’s window manager, menu and panel, keeping to the traditional desktop metaphor, but allowing a few modern luxuries (like type-to-search in the menu).
Billed as a web-centric OS, it enables web apps to be ‘installed’ to the system menu. Furthermore it runs these in a Site Specific Browser (SSB) instance. The Ice tool enables you to configure each SSB, including which browser to use (Chrome,
Chromium, Vivaldi and Firefox are supported), which icon to use and whether to use an isolated browser.
We know – anyone can make a shortcut to open a web browser at a given URL. But web apps look tidier in an SSB, as there are no crufty menus or toolbars to get in
the way. A number of web apps are set up out of the box, including Microsoft Office Online, Google apps and the mighty Betterthanchess. com which uses WEBGL to provide a glorious 3D chess experience. It aims to do what Chrome OS has done – provide a stable platform for running web apps – but at the same time still be useful (and in fact excellent) as a traditional OS.
If you’re prompted for a username it’s ‘peppermint’, and the password is blank. If this happens it’s usually a sign that the desktop isn’t going to load, which is usually indicative of a graphics driver problem.
Last issue we didn’t have any 32-bit distros so it’s nice to include one this time. Peppermint should continue to see updates for as long as Mint does, which is until 2023.