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This article originally appeared in issue 91 of Linux User & Developer magazine.
Peppermint Ice homepage
Pros: Blazingly fast OS. The Ice applet lets you easily create attractive shortcuts to cloud-based applications
Cons: Doesn’t have enough features to warrant the ‘cloud-oriented’ OS sticker
Cloud applications are all the rage these days, and so are cloud-oriented Linux distributions, it seems. Meet a new entrant to the increasingly crowded arena of distros that bring the cloud to your desktop – Peppermint OS.
Almost nobody nowadays builds Linux distros from scratch, and Peppermint OS is no exception. The new distro is based – yes, you’ve guessed it – on the latest version of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, or rather its unofficial spin-off Lubuntu. The key attraction of Lubuntu, and thus Peppermint Ice , is LXDE – a fast and lightweight desktop environment.
Indeed, Peppermint OS is lightning fast even on modest hardware, which makes it a good choice for a netbook or an older notebook. It’s not all pure *buntu, though. Peppermint OS adds some Linux Mint ingredients to the mix, including the mintUpdate and mintInstall tools.
Peppermint OS is available in two flavours (no pun intended): One and Ice. The former relies on the Mozilla Prism technology to bring cloud applications to the desktop and Mozilla Firefox as its primary browser. Peppermint Ice, in turn, sports Chromium as its default browser and uses the custom Ice tool to link cloud applications to the desktop.
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