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?

Mac-like

Mac-like 

 Everybody knows that Apple is the Rolls-Royce of computing. When I encountered my first Mac, back in early 1985, every computer I had ever used before became a second-class citizen. And even when Apple's fortunes hit rock bottom in the dark nineties (do you remember a pic of a Windows install disc with the legend, "One OS to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them"?) the Mac refused to die. Why? I've always believed it was a combination of three things: 

a Mac always worked straight out of the box; 
a Mac always expressed the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) that stood behind it; 
and, if you had the courage and a little bit of skill, a Mac could always be tweaked. 

My favourite Mac OS was OS 7; my favourite Mac program was the experimental but amazing Cyberdog (an Internet suite built to demonstrate the concept and power of OpenDoc). Cyberdog was a joint project of Apple and IBM and it was killed off c.1997 by Microsoft pressure; Windows 8 reminds me of it everytime I see a new WinBox. Anyway, now it's 2014 and I still have my Macs. But I now also have linux. My first linux love was Bianca (2.2) and I still use Mint (Quiana 17 is on a partition of this machine). But now linux also has its own OS 7. It's name is elementary OS.

Peppermint 3 has arrived!

Finally, Peppermint 3 OS has arrived... it's what I'm using right now and so far, so good. It's built upon Lubuntu and Mint and looks and feels great (I'm not a fan of the new Ubuntu desktop at all). I've installed it on an old 256 RAM machine, but everything is working at the moment and I particularly like the fact that this Peppermint is not overloaded with programs I won't use. Since the early days of the Mac I've really enjoyed customising what I'm using and Peppermint 3 gives me that option from the get-go.

After 3 days, Peppermint 3 is still working really well. I had the usual odd window behaviour as with Peppermints 1, 2 and Ice, but that was easily fixed.

Jolicloud 1.0

Well, I updated to Jolicloud 1.0 today and so far so good. I do like the uncluttered interface, although it's quite a bit different from the pre-release final version. As with all new things it will take a while to get used to and I think I'll need to play with this latest version for a day or two before I can say whether it will challenge Peppermint for me or not.

And I'm also keen to download an iso of the new OS to install on a laptop to see if it runs well there too... like many users I work on a variety of machines and I like compatibility.

Peppermint vs Jolicloud

Ok, I've been trying out these two implementations of a Cloud-based OS, and I like them both. It's amazing how quickly my thinking has adjusted to their different designs. My verdict right now is to use Peppermint for laptops and Jolicloud for networks--but that decision is based primarily on the fact that I can't get Jolicloud to install on anything other than my Samsung NC10, where it works just fine.

Both use online suites of apps-- Google's; and, in Jolicloud's case, Adobe's air.

They differ in interface design and underlying technologies.

Both are built on Ubuntu, but Jolicloud looks more like an iPhone desktop than Ubuntu. Peppermint looks like Linux Mint. Rather than a browser, dedicated panes are used to run web applications: Peppermint uses Mozilla's Prism; Jolicloud uses Google's Chrome.

I have had no problems at all so far with either system (although I'm using the Peppermint respin rather than the initial buggy offering).

Which will be the winner? probably something else entirely, but these are showing the way to go. Recommended.