Peppermint OS Five Review: Move over Lubuntu - Peppermint with 5 years of support is here!

Peppermint OS is a Lubuntu based distro offering lightening fast speed, superb cloud and web-based applications and is easy on system resources. On 23 June 2014, Kendall Weaver announced the release of Peppermint OS Five, a Lubuntu-based lightweight and easy-to-use desktop Linux distribution: "Peppermint OS LLC is excited to announce the launch of our latest operating system, Peppermint Five. Lightweight and designed for speed, Peppermint Five delivers on that promise whether using software on your desktop, online, or using cloud-based applications. Highlights: built on a long-term support (LTS) code base, Ubuntu 14.04; Peppermint Ice is our in-house built SSB manager, it has been rewritten from scratch and is now significantly more stable and more feature rich than past versions; we've fixed a number of upstream bugs present in Lubuntu, the specific project we fork from; Peppermint-Light is our new window manager and widget theme designed to offer a clean and relatively flat look and feel."

From Peppermint 5 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

For this review, I downloaded the 600 MB 64 MB ISO which features LXDE desktop, Linux kernel 3.13.0 and PCManFM 1.2.0 as the file manager. I created a live USB using Linux Mint Image writer and installed Peppermint on my Asus K55VM.

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Peppermint OS Four Review: Linux Mint of Lubuntu with added Ice and Web apps!

Peppermint OS Four is one distro, possibly, I haven't paid sufficient attention till date. This week first time I made an honest effort to understand and use it for a few days continuously. I must say I am very impressed with the new Peppermint OS release - Peppermint OS Four. Earlier my impression was it is just repackaged Lubuntu. But, with continuous usage for a few days, my impression changed - it brings a lot more to the user than the parent distro Lubuntu. I guess you'll understand more what I am saying in the remaining part of the review.

From Peppermint OS 4 http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

Peppermint OS Four is the latest stable release. It is based on Ubuntu (Lubuntu) 13.04 and has LXDE, a very lightweight desktop environment with Linux kernel 3.8.0-25. The release note states:

"Welcome back to the new and improved Peppermint web site and welcome to the next iteration of our operating system: Peppermint Four. We are seriously excited about this release and we hope you are as ecstatic as all of us on Team Peppermint. Make sure to download a bunch of copies and give them to friends and family; they will thank you, for sure. Peppermint Four is based on the Ubuntu 13.04 code base and uses the LXDE desktop environment, but now with Xfwm4 instead of Openbox as the window manager. Other new features in this release are that we've included some example games by default including Entanglement and First Person Tetris. We've also added some metapackages for popular tasks such as graphic arts and photography to the Featured section of the Software Manager." 

I downloaded the 32-bit Peppermint OS Four ISO, 588 MB in size, for this review. I created a live USB using Unetbootin to do a live boot followed by installation on my Asus K54C laptop with Core i3 2.2 Ghz processor & 2 GB RAM. Peppermint has a lighter ISO than Lubuntu 13.04 because of it's focus on web based applications whereas Lubuntu focuses more on offline apps.

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