When I was a kid, I used to watch the Creature Double Feature on channel 56. The Creature Double Feature was something I loved tuning into every Saturday, it was basically a double blast of monster movies. What could be better than two monster movies for a kid to watch on a Saturday?
One of the best movies was called War of the Gargantuas. The film was about two brother gargantuas who go to war against each other. One was brown (the peaceful one who lived in the mountains) and the other one was green (he was psychotic and lived in the ocean). During the course of the film, the two gargantuas went to war with each other and mayhem resulted. The green gargantua still gives me the willies, even after all these years.
The trailer for the movie is below, along with another clip. A true monster movie classic!
The Peppermint Gargantuas
Now – many years after the War of the Gargantuas movie – there are two more gargantuas that are at war. These two aren’t brown and green, these two are peppermint. I’m referring, of course, to Peppermint OS One and Peppermint Ice. Both are web-centric Linux distros, designed to give Ubuntu users easy access to some of the best web applications available.
Which one of these peppermint distros is the best? Which one should you download? I’ll answer that in this column as I explore the pros and cons of each version.
Why Two Versions of Peppermint OS?
The decision by the developers to create two peppermint distros is, at first, somewhat puzzling. After all, wouldn’t it be easier to simply maintain one? After an email exchange with one of the developers, I finally understood why. It seems that there were many in the Peppermint OS community that really wanted a version that used Chromium instead of Firefox, and thus Peppermint Ice was born to give those folks what they wanted.
The Peppermint Ice desktop.
The Peppermint OS One desktop.
Some probably think this is a bad idea, but I respect the developers for listening to their users. As long as the two distros can be maintained at parity with each other, having two shouldn’t be a problem. But the developers should be very, very clear on their site about why both exist and what each has to offer.
Peppermint Ice Review Follies
Before I delve into each of the peppermint gargantuas; it’s necessary to convey an amusing aside about the recent review of Peppermint Ice I wrote for Desktop Linux Reviews. When I first heard about Peppermint Ice, I assumed (never a good idea to assume anything) that it was the upgrade to Peppermint OS One. So the review I wrote was totally from that perspective.
Well shortly after publishing my review and beginning to market it on various social media services, I got an email from one of the developers pointing out that Peppermint OS One and Peppermint Ice were two different distros. Peppermint Ice was not an upgrade for Peppermint OS One.
Oops! How horrible! I had made a really stupid error and had no choice but to frantically rewrite the review even as people began to come from various social media sites to read it. This was absolutely not what a writer wants to be doing at the last minute. Thankfully, I was able get the rewrite done very, very fast. It’s amazing what a little adrenaline and potential large-scale humiliation can do for the speed of an edit.
That aside, I’ll look at the differences between these two distros on the next page and I’ll tell you who the winner is between our two peppermint gargantuas.
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I quickly determined that the only significant difference between Ice and One were the browsers and the wallpaper. I, too, preferred Peppermint OS One’s wallpaper, so I solved the browser thing like any true geek would do – I just downloaded Chromium and that was it.
Then I created my OWN SSB instances using Chromium in addition to the ones created by the distro makers. Voila, I have both, plus what I consider the nicer appearance.
Moreover, I’ve taken the SSB idea and carried it to numerous other distros. I’ve used combinations of Mozilla Prism, Adobe Air with application instances, and Google’s Chrome and Chromium. Based on my very informal, but very widespread usage of multiple browser based platforms, I can tell you that Google’s platform performs faster than the others, but Mozilla’s Prism is not very far behind. Adobe’s implementation definitely lags significantly, both in performance and appearance compared to the Google and Mozilla offerings.
I’d don’t need Peppermint OS, but it gave me some additional ideas to try out on my own. I still keep it handy, but I mostly do my experimentation on sidux and antiX. Speaking of antiX, a new development of antiX called antiX core makes it possible to make super light implementations. It starts without X and without anything except the core system and utilities. This means that it is very light and fast. I then add an X server to it and a lightweight desktop – so far, I’ve added TWO: LXDE and XFCE. Man, that XFCE is the fastest XFCE implementation I’ve ever seen, because it has ONLY what I included in it. I added some SSB instances of Chromium, then added IceWeasel and IceApe, just so I’d have a bit of status quo around. What a great system, and it’s all mine – my own custom core, based on antiX core.
I had started using Peppermint One on my eee 701 netbook because the machine has low ressources. So speed and memory usage are essential and Peppermint Whichever is really good at this.
What’s more, it so happens that Chrome has a better rendering on my tiny computer screen than Firefox, and is faster too. So I recently shifted to Ice.
But it is true the Ice splash screen is just ugly… How do you change this?
Thanks to the Peppermint people anyway: they’re doing a great job!
After using Lubuntu 10.04 I decided to have a go with Peppermint OS One and everything went just great. I liked the overall look better than Lubuntu and I “was sold” immediately ! Sadly enough I had to change to Lubuntu again because of HDD-problems. Even reinstalling three times the problems kept coming. The fact is that my external HD flipped out of sight when selecting it. That’s why I’m staying with Lubuntu. Actually there’s no much difference between them ….
I’ve never used either version of Peppermint OS but Creature Double Feature on channel 56 ruled! I spent many Saturday afternoons as a kid glued to the TV with that show on.
Anyone who hasn’t at least tried out Peppermint, is just missing out. The Ice version is the quickest distro of the 30 or more that I have ever tried. They don’t come with a load of crap most folks will never even use, but they have anything a NORMAL person could ever want in the package manager ready to be added, or removed at the owners whim. I think Peppermint is the future, and the future is now!
@oldrong: Perhaps Peppermint OS is the fastest of the thirty or so distributions that you have tried out, and it indeed ranks among the fastest I’ve tried too, but as I mentioned in my comments, I applied some of the ideas I learned from Peppermint and took them to some of my other favorite distributions and found the effect to be the same. Moreover, I experimented with a rather raw, but functional antiX core (not your every day distribution, but one in which you can create whatever kind of system you want), and I was able to make my own Web app custom distribution that even beats One and Ice on boot speed, and definitely on snapping up the desktop upon login. It’s clearly not the “drop in and run” distribution that Ice and One are though. On the other hand, it wasn’t tough, and it didn’t take long at all to create precisely what I wanted, and it sure is FAST!
I’m not in any way diminishing the great work that Kendall and Shane have done. All I am saying is that there are other alternatives, too, especially for people who prefer to customize their own work. Ice is nice, but core is cool.
@Brian. More power to you, and I hope your creation is exactly what you want. I am not one who has the time, or knowledge to “make” a core of any distro into something I would want.
I simply find One, and Ice so simple to customize with little or no knowledge of the “innards” of an operating system, I think they could easily appeal to MS users, and may even entice them to try Linux, and leave the bonds of Windows. I think that is some of the reason Kendall, Shane, and all the developers at Peppermint began this journey, and I applaud them for it.
Good luck to you, and I hope you version of Linux serves you well for many years to come.
@oldrong: I don’t expect that antiX core will have a very large following. Peppermint OS is much more likely to create a nice niche, and if the DistroWatch ratings are at all meaningful, for a few weeks over the past three months, Peppermint OS has made it into the top ten in terms of site visits. That says a lot considering Peppermint was new this Spring.
I’ve been using Pep-One for a month. I have been a disrto-junkie for the last ten years, and this one is a keeper! It is by far the fastest I’ve ever used. For the heck of it, I installed Gnome in the thing… and that hardly slowed it down! I’m probably going to try and tweak it into an audio station and see how that goes.
What I really like about both distros is that they have excellent wireless support. Probably the best I’ve seen from linux so far. Also, very easy to use and installing was a breeze.
to oldrong August 12, 2010 at 11:44 am
Try Paldo Linux os
@ amv:
I am burning a copy of the live Cd as I type this, but I already see two things against it for me, and those are gnome desktop (too bloated with things I don’t need), and over 200mb larger in size than Peppermint. But I like test driving distros, so I will give it a look. I did look at the supplied screenshot, and it was really boring, but of course, that can be changed. Thanks for the suggestion though.
I tried Peppermint OS One when it initially came out and liked it but started to have issues with the version of PC Man so I left it for the LXDE version of Mint (Kendall maintains this as well). When Ice came out I gave it another try and I am glad I did because I love it. I have made a lot of modifications to suit me but I prefer Chromium to Firefox these days and I actually prefer the color scheme of Ice. One thing not mentioned in the review is that Ice does not come with any kind of print manager, unlike One. Here is the solution if your using Ice and want to print.
In lxterminal:
apt install cups hplip system-config-printer-gnome
@ Aaron:
The thing I like most about both peppermints is they are modular. If you don’t like something, remove it, and put in what you like.pcmanfm had a glitch, and Kendall posted the cure for it, and it was fine after that, but some have preferred Thunar, so they simply remove pcmanfm, and install Thunar, no problems. It seems any changes made make very little change in the speed, and that is a plus.
@ oldrong:
You’ve probably found out by now, Peppermint is not a native Gnome desktop. I installed on mine, and it’s still extremely quick.