Peppermint OS One made quite a splash when I reviewed it. Many people had never heard of it, and there was a lot of curiosity about a web-oriented remaster of Ubuntu. Some time has passed and there’s a related version that has been released. This new distro is called Peppermint Ice. Why is it called Ice? Well read on to find out.
Please note that development of Peppermint OS One will continue. Peppermint Ice is a separate distro and the Peppermint developers will be supporting both versions. The developers got a lot of requests from the Peppermint OS One community to do a version with Chromium as the browser and thus Peppermint Ice was born.
What’s New In This Release
The biggest difference between Peppermint OS One and Peppermint Ice is the inclusion of a new Site Specific Browser (SSB) written by Peppermint Ice developer Kendall Weaver. Ice is the name of the SSB, and it uses Chromium (the default browser in Peppermint Ice) to run web applications. Using an SSB, instead of running applications in a tabbed browser, for example, helps provide greater stability and uses screen space more effectively.
My experience with using web applications in Peppermint Ice via the Ice SSB was very good. I opened a bunch of web applications and everything ran very well, I had no problems with speed or stability (with the one exception of Facebook, which I’ll talk about in the problems section). I left the applications running for hours and didn’t notice any problems with them.
Since Peppermint Ice uses LXDE as its desktop environment, it’s very fast. If you have older hardware, you’ll be particularly pleased with Peppermint Ice. Booting up or shutting down happens very quickly.
Facebook running in an Ice SSB.
Some might be thrown off by the inclusion of Chromium as the default browser for Peppermint Ice, but I think it’s a good choice. Firefox is still available via Software Manager if you want it, but Chromium seems to be significantly faster to me. That said, I also think it’s a good idea to keep Firefox around in case you bump into a site that isn’t quite compatible with Chromium.
And please note that Peppermint OS One will still have Firefox as its default browser.
Chromium is now the default browser in Peppermint Ice.
As you can see from the Live CD desktop screenshot below, the desktop wallpaper and peppermint logo are different from Peppermint OS One. The red and white wallpaper and logo are gone; they’ve been replaced by blue and white versions. I’ll talk about that more in the desktop section.
The Peppermint Ice live CD desktop.
On the next page, I’ll look at the hardware requirements and the install routine.
(4 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
This one is best Linux.Period.