Recently Linux Mint released Linux Mint 17. Before we get to my review there is a little bit of news with this release. According to their release notes Linux Mint will now only be updating their Ubuntu based versions along with every Long Term Support release from Ubuntu going forward. For Linux Mint diehards that means you no longer have to update your OS every 6 months. For those of you who wanted to update even less often Mint also has their Debian based distro called LMDE.
What can be said about Mint that hasn’t already been said? It’s not the most popular Linux distro for nothing. It comes in your choice of desktops, either MATE or Cinnamon. I chose the Cinnamon desktop since it feels a lot more modern than MATE. Just my preference. It’s a good-looking distro, clean and crisp even though it still has that horrible shade of green to it. The only problem I had been that every time I booted up it wanted a keyring password from me. That was easily fixable by going to this link.
Also I don’t recommend this distro for slower or older computers, my EEEBox pretty much choked on Linux Mint 17. However if you do have an older computer and still want all the advantages of Mint they should be releasing an XFCE version of Mint in the coming months.
Speaking of the EEEBox I was looking for a distro that would be usable as an everyday distro and not just a test distro. I decided to give Peppermint OS a try . I’ve used Peppermint before on the EEEPC but stopped using it when the distro exceeded the limit of the EEEPC’s very tiny disk drive. I thought if it worked good the netbook it would work great on the desktop.
Peppermint is a Lubuntu based distro, that means it comes with the low resource using LXDE desktop. Peppermint is also very cloud-centric which means it doesn’t come with a lot of bloatware and is very snappy.
After downloading Peppermint 4 my desktop was up and running and rather smoothly I might add. My only issued are with LXDE itself which is not Peppermint’s fault. My desktop is usually dual booted with two Linux distros and on LXDE to access the other partition you have to enter your root password. I don’t care for that. But if you don’t have a touch of OCD like me when it comes to your OS and you have an older or under-powered computer Peppermint OS is a great choice.
Also both Mint and Peppermint are great distros for beginners. They both get a thumbs up from yours truly.
The Trench Reynolds Report 