Peppermint 7
Alexander Tolstoy is happy to have his head in the clouds thanks to some remarkable features of the Peppermint OS.
Alexander Tolstoy is a big fan of low resource tools and distros, so he thinks you’re going to love this Ubuntu 16.04 LTS spin that uses the LXDE.
Taking an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution (distro) for a spin tends to return very predictable results in most cases, but with Peppermint OS things are more interesting—in a good way. Peppermint is a well-established project that’s been delivering a lightweight and visually attractive Linux distro for as long as seven years. The latest version is Peppermint 7, released last summer but frequently updated afterwards with fresh ‘re-spins’. For this review, we’re testing the ISO that was released at the end of November 2016 and Peppermint 7 is based on Ubuntu 16.04, which gives it a solid foundation with a long term support.
The user interface implements the classic desktop paradigm, with bottom panel, Start menu and a desktop that you can populate with your files or folders. After a closer look, it becomes evident that the GUI is a mixture of specific components derived from various desktop environments, such as Cinnamon, LXDE, Xfce and Mate.
We have the Xfce panel with the Whisker menu, Nemo file manager, Pluma text editor, the clone of Linux Mint installer and so on, but as long as every application is based on the GTK toolkit, there’s virtually nothing out of place. However, Peppermint tops it with its home-grown terminal emulator and settings panel.
The interface is very consistent throughout the desktop, thanks to the original ‘Peppermint’ styling. The default theme is dark and it plays nicely with modern flat circular icons. However, the unique identity of Peppermint is not in its fast and responsive desktop, even though we can firmly recommend this distro for low-end machines.
Cloud desktop
Right from the early days, when Peppermint had just forked away from Lubuntu, the team had positioned its system as ‘cloud-based’. According to the project’s website and the very decent and extensive documentation, Peppermint merges traditional desktop apps with cloud services (or web apps, if you like). Browsing the Whisker menu categories quickly makes you notice entries such as Editor by Pixlr, Google Drive or Gmail. These are the links to the respective services, each being wrapped into a web browser window without any panels or plug-ins.
The Peppermint team maintains Ice, a tool for managing such desktop entries. Using Ice you can create or edit custom web application shortcuts; choose whether you want it to be powered by MozillaFirefox (default), GoogleChrome or Chromium; set up icons and choose menu subcategories. Integrating web applications into the convenient desktop helps keep the system lightweight in terms of the hard disk footprint. In fact, we’d say that Peppermint is probably a better alternative to other ‘light’ Linux distros when you want to breath new life into a decade-old PC that you can speed up, for example, by adding a solid state drive. Peppermint will help you save the drive in the long run by off loading many operations online.
Of course, this fast and smart Linux distro isn’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, simply because you don’t have to rely on image editors or word processors that are actually run by a third party. But the more evident obstacle is the dependency on your internet connection. More than that, each wrapped web application uses its own web browser profile, which simply will not work very well if you access the web through a proxy. According to the Peppermint forums, this is a known issue and also another reason to learn how to change global variables used by Chromium or Firefox. Regardless, this doesn’t spoil the party, and the OS leaves a positive and bright impression.