Jim Lynch

Technology and Other Musings

War of the peppermint gargantuas

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 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 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!

Before I go any further, I want to encourage folks that are new to Linux to check out these helpful books on Amazon. They will help you understand what Linux has to offer and will let you get the most out of it.

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 only 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 wanted a version that used Chromium instead of Firefox, and thus Peppermint Ice was born to give those folks what they wanted.

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 foolish 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 not what a writer wants to be doing at the last minute. Thankfully, I was able to 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.

The differences between the peppermint gargantuas

Now let’s take a look at what each distro has to offer. All things considered, there aren’t very many differences between the two distros. Here’s a brief list of each:

Peppermint OS One
Firefox as the Default Browser
Prism SSB
Red and White Peppermint Wallpaper and Logo

Peppermint Ice
Chromium as the Default Browser
Ice SSB
Blue and White Peppermint Wallpaper and Logo

I’ll cover the SSB issue below in the section about speed, including the term’s definition.

Regarding the issue of browsers, I have to give it to Chromium. I still love Firefox, but I can understand why some people would drift away from Peppermint OS to Peppermint Ice to use Chromium as the default browser. Firefox has been lagging behind Chrome/Chromium, and that seems to have affected its usage among some users.

As far as wallpaper and logos go, Peppermint OS One looks much better to me than Peppermint Ice. Peppermint Ice’s blue and white colors strike me as lacking in energy, I find them blase and rather dreary compared to Peppermint OS One’s. Of course, this is simply wallpaper aesthetics. It’s quite simple enough to change the default wallpaper.

The best SSB

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, SSB means merely Site Specific Browser.

Here’s a more detailed definition of that from Wikipedia:

A site-specific browser (SSB) is a software application that is dedicated to accessing pages from a single source (site) on a computer network such as the Internet or a private intranet. SSBs typically simplify the more complex functions of a web browser by excluding the menus, toolbars and browser chrome associated with functions that are external to the workings of a single site.

Site-specific browsers are often implemented through the use of existing application frameworks such as Gecko, WebKit, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (the underlying layout engines, specifically Trident and JScript) and Opera’s Presto. SSBs built upon these frameworks allow web applications and social networking tools to start with desktop icons launching in a manner similar to standard non-browser applications.

Peppermint OS One uses the Prism SSB from Mozilla; Peppermint Ice uses the Ice SSB that was written by one of the Peppermint developers. Which one is better? Which one is faster?

In an email with one of the Peppermint developers a while back, he mentioned that they thought that the Ice SSB was a bit faster than the Prism SSB. But is it?

I did some informal testing and, frankly, I did notice a difference between the Ice and Prism SSBs. The Ice SSB edged out the Prism SSB when loading web applications like Facebook and Pandora. It wasn’t that much faster, but it was a little bit faster. The Ice SSB was about a second or two quicker than the Prism SSB.

Final thoughts about the gargantuas

So who’s the ultimate victor? Well, in the movie, the ending is somewhat dismal as both gargantuas are killed. So neither of them ultimately wins in the end. Fortunately, our peppermint gargantuas are alive and well. But there can only be one winner, and the winner is Peppermint Ice.

The combination of Chromium and the Ice SSB edges out (barely) Peppermint OS One. It’s not a big enough difference that you could go wrong using Peppermint OS One, but the Chromium/Ice SSB combination was fast enough to warrant using Peppermint Ice.

I am, of course, assuming that speed is the most important thing to you. If I were going to pick a winner based on aesthetics, I’d have chosen Peppermint OS One. The logo and wallpaper are far more attractive than the washed out, blue and white colors in Peppermint Ice.

So Peppermint Ice wins our War of the Peppermint Gargantuas. Unlike in the movie, at least this time nobody got eaten or stepped on as the gargantuas fought it out until the bitter end.

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Published by

Jim Lynch

10 responses to “War of the peppermint gargantuas”

  1. Brian Masinick Avatar
    Brian Masinick

    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.

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  2. Yves14 Avatar
    Yves14

    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!

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  3. Ferre Avatar
    Ferre

    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 ….

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  4. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    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.

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  5. oldrong Avatar
    oldrong

    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! :devil:

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    1. Brian Masinick Avatar
      Brian Masinick

      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.

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      1. oldrong Avatar
        oldrong

        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. 🙂

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      2. Brian Masinick Avatar
        Brian Masinick

        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.

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  6. Sonicfrog Avatar
    Sonicfrog

    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.

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  7. Aaron Avatar
    Aaron

    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

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