Peppermint Ice review

The lead developer of Peppermint OS calls Ice a ‘Site Specific Browser.’ Basically, this tool replicates 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.

On the productivity front, the Office section of the Applications menu features shortcuts to Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Reader. Linking to Google tools seems like an obvious choice, but we would rather see an integration with the Zoho productivity applications, since they offer more in terms of features, 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 OS comes with a few regular desktop applications which can help you to stay productive and entertained while off-line. This includes the Leafpad text editor, the ePDFViewer document viewer, and the Xnoise music player. We also appreciate the inclusion of the Dropbox software which lets you sync files and documents across multiple machines.

Of course, since Peppermint OS is based on Ubuntu, you can install any application available in the Ubuntu software repositories. While you can do that using the Synaptic package manager, Peppermint OS offers an even more user-friendly way of finding and installing software, courtesy of the mintInstall utility originally developed as part of the Linux Mint project.

Similar to Ubuntu Software Center, mintInstall acts as an application store where all software is organised in groups, and it lets you easily install applications you like. 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.

All in all, Peppermint OS is a decent Ubuntu remix that is both fast and light. But the question is whether it brings enough to the table to replace whatever distro you are running on your notebook. Considering the competition, probably not yet. Jolicloud, for example, is also based on Ubuntu (albeit the older 9.04 release), but it provides better compatibility with netbooks and sports a novel interface as well as a handful of unique features like the ability to sync installed applications between different machines.

Verdict: 3/5
At the end of the day, 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.

See also:
Jolicloud 1.0 review
Dell Streak review

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