Peppermint 5: I'm disappointed

I was an early adopter of Peppermint OS, and a big fan. This was in the days when Peppermint was not numbered, but known as Ice, and other innovative browsers like Flock were recognising that the mushrooming of social media sites and the emergence of cloud computing were going to take us all into regions that we hadn't even thought of. Ice had a small footprint, the Ice app, cloud-centric design, and was fast -- even on under-powered machines. I loved it. I loved One, Two, and Three as well. But then came Peppermint Four and Peppermint Four was ultimately too finicky and frustrating for me to use. I I always seemed to have problems with panels and the Chromium browser the OS was built on. Well, I was triple-booting as usual, so I just stuck to Mint and whatever else I was running as an alternative. I was sad to lose Peppermint but content. Yet I wanted Peppermint to do well.

Recently Peppermint Five was released, to some acclaim. Most reviewers wrote as if Peppermint Five was a new OS, not a revamped one, and I was encouraged enough to download the ISO and run it. The live CD worked well and so I installed it...

But for me the same problems are there. Compared to Mint and elementary Freya (my current first choices) Peppermint 5 is sluggish, crash-prone, unreliable and user unfriendly. It doesn't help that Mint (Cinnamon) and elementary Freya look better too.

I'm very disappointed, especially since I believe the real mobile revolution is not in hardware but a move away from desktops to browsers (as in Google's Chromebooks) and Peppermint could be a real leader here.

One final word. On Mint and Freya I use Mozilla's Firefox, and with the power of its add-ons, these have become very browser-centric for me and easy to sync with my android phones. Perhaps Peppermint could try using Mozilla again?

Peppermint-One Jan 2011 respin is the biz!

Yes, this post is slightly late... well, I was actually looking for a torrent of the latest Peppermint Ice respin (March 2011) but couldn't find one, so I tried the latest Peppermint-One edition instead. I was happily surprised.

My preference for Ice over One was simply related to the underlying browser-base of each of the distros; the Mozilla-Prism combo of One was often slow and unwieldy because Firefox had itself become bloated. So I preferred Peppermint Ice since it was built on a Chromium-Ice combination. Now, ironically, I find that Chromium has begun to show signs of bloat, and that the new Peppermint-One uses the sleeker and much faster Firefox 4.0 (Beta 9).

In other words, get your copy of Peppermint-One's 01042011 iso, burn it to disc, and install it today! You won't be disappointed. It's fast, efficient, and a real pleasure to use, even with limited RAM. Well done to the Peppermint team.

A quick meerkat (Lubuntu 10.10)

As you know, I'm using a minimum-ram laptop at work so the full-blown-bells-and-whistles (read bloated) OS-es are not really an option for me right now, especially as it's the desktop environment that typically hogs the available RAM.

Peppermint's two flavours -- Standard and Ice -- are great, as is Jolicloud 1.0. To these I can now add Light Ubuntu (Lubuntu). Lubuntu is another LXDE environment (the Peppermints are too) with Openbox but the newest release is built upon Ubuntu's meerkat (10.10) whereas the Peppermints are using lucid (10.04).

Lubuntu 10.10 is fast, attractive, and pretty much ideal once you've installed it and added a few tweaks. Since I always use more than one partition on my machines, I encountered a GRUB problem after installing Lubuntu in that I could access other OS-es but not boot from them. The problem was that Lubuntu doesn't install osprober so the startup sequence doesn't see the other partitions. The way to fix this is simple, however. Open a terminal, type

sudo apt-get install os-prober then
update-grub

and the other systems will be available to select from at the next reboot.

The other tweak is to download a new lubuntu add-on, lubuntu-control-center_0.2_all.deb which is available from the web: http://www.mediafire.com/?3kyy21ubztiki0c. This gives you a gui that you can use to modify much of lubuntu's interface.


But there's more:

If you like Peppermint Ice's respin cursors, you can get them from synaptic -- search for dmz-cursors, download and restart.

An easy way to get a terminal is to add (again through synaptic) a little app called guake, which allows you to utilise F12 for this purpose. I've found it very handy.

There's no need for Peppermint's Ice web-app creator, since Lubuntu comes with Chromium as default and you can create your own web-apps by going to a site with the browser, selecting tools, create application shortcuts, and saving the new app directly into your Applications menu.

And, of course, if you choose to add Firefox (not installed with Lubuntu) remember to add my Sifundzani1 Firefox Persona!

Overall, I like the new Lubuntu; and I think its menu behaviour is actually better than Peppermint's at this point. It's also of course very fast.

Ice Ice Baby! (Peppermint Ice)

Ubuntu -- Linux Mint -- Peppermint -- Jolicloud -- Peppermint Ice: it's becoming quite a family. This blog post is being written and posted using Peppermint Ice OS, which is the newest baby in this lineage (only a few days old at this point). It's fast, so far stable, and different from Peppermint (no ice) mainly in that it uses Google's Chromium browser and elements rather than Mozilla's Firefox and Prism to create browser-based applets.

The change might be significant. Jolicloud started out by using Mozilla and Prism, then switched to Chromium; Peppermint also began with Prism... and now Ice has arrived, using Chromium.

More on this after a day or two.

new Flock Beta released

The long-anticipated release of Firefox appeared recently (v3) and now the Flock version is out in Beta (v2).  It might still be a bit buggy (natch, that's why it's still a beta), but then again it might not; try it out and see how it works for you on your setup. The Firefox build is fast, so the new Flock should be a lot faster too. (I'm running Flock 2 Beta on an Apple Mac G5 laptop, OSX Tiger, and it's OK for me.)

Blogged with the Flock Browser