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Review on Peppermint Ice - The new cloud-oriented desktop distro
Ever since the release of Peppermint Ice, the main question has been that can it do the same magic for desktop PCs as Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS are doing for netbooks.
Pros
- Super fast operating system.
- Attractive shortcuts using the ice applet.
Cons
- Not enough features to be marked as cloud oriented operating system.
Cloud computing has emerged as a big bang, and cloud-oriented Linux distributions are much talked about these days. Peppermint Ice is a name that will be talked about for years to come
All the upcoming linux distributions are based on some previous one, they add functionality and pack it with a different brand name giving credit to the original developers. Peppermint didn't dare to different and is based upon the much popular Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Different from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Peppermint Ice uses the light weight LXDE desktop, which makes it super fast.
Minimum System Requirement
- i386 or derivative processor (AMD64 and x86_64 are fine as well)
- 192 MB of RAM
- 4 GB hard drive space (this is an overestimate just for good measure)
As the system requirement suggests the peppermint ice will run smoothly even on modest of the machines, which makes it a good candidate for older netbooks. Peppermint is not a complete Ubuntu variant rather adds some of the mint functionality as well.
Peppermint OS is available in two flavors: One and Ice. One relies on the Mozilla Prism technology to bring cloud applications to the desktop and uses Mozilla Firefox as its primary browser. While on the other hand Peppermint Ice, sports Chromium as its default browser and uses the custom Ice tool to link cloud applications to the desktop.
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| Peppermint Ice Desktop | Peppermint One Desktop |
The lead developer of Peppermint OS calls Ice as a "Site Specific Browser." This tool copies the functionality of Mozilla Prism for the Chromium browser. Using Ice, you can create a shortcut to a cloud application which opens in a stripped-down version of Chromium. Despite its simplicity, this is a rather useful and easy to use tool. Peppermint OS comes with a few "Iced" shortcuts in the Applications menu, including Seesmic, Facebook, YouTube and Last.fm.
The office section of Peppermint comes with links to Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Reader. Linking to Google tools seems like an obvious choice. But, one would rather prefer to link to Zoho productivity applications as they provide more functionality and the readily available webservice-office-zoho package from Ubuntu’s main software repository provides a better integration of key Zoho apps with the desktop.
Peppermint come with some standard desktop applications to enhance the productivity of the user with applications like Leafpad text editor, the ePDFViewer document viewer, and the Xnoise music player. I also appreciate the inclusion of the Dropbox software which lets the user to synchronize his files and documents across multiple machines, making it a very useful application.
If you have use ubuntu then you will find the software manager fairly familiar, same grouped software are present in the software manager. Unlike Ubuntu Software Center, mintInstall also allows you to rate and review applications. Another utility transplanted from Linux Mint – mintUpdate – helps you to keep Peppermint OS up-to-date.
LinuxUser.co.uk has reated Pappermint 3/5 commenting,
Peppermint OS is just another Ubuntu-based distro with a few tweaks here and there and the Ice tool on top of it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be more than that to make it an appealing proposition.
Overall, I am not even that impressed to give 3/5 there are just too many distros like the Papermint in order to impress the cloud community, you have to do better than this to be counted.
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