14 DAY TRIAL // Peppermint Five, a very light distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and LXDE, is now available for download.
This latest iteration of Peppermint was released a year ago and, back then, it was using Ubuntu 13.04. The developers have moved up from that version and they are now using Ubuntu 14.04, which is the latest LTS released by Canonical.
Future Peppermint users will benefit from this decision made by the developers because it means that the support period for the OS will most likely coincide with the one for Ubuntu, which is five years.
This is a very light distribution that uses LXDE as the desktop environment and Xfwm4 as the default windows manager. The developers have explained that this should set their OS apart, especially because most other distributions usually go for Openbox as the window manager.
"Initially, Peppermint One was designed out of our desire for an operating system optimized for working online. Each year since then, we have improved on it, and we are very excited about new and improved features in Peppermint Five," said Kendall Weaver, chief technical officer of Peppermint.
"With this release we are getting ready for the future. The technology landscape is constantly changing, and we are always responding to meet our user’s needs. We are 100% driven to deliver an OS that is fast, secure, and available everywhere, Peppermint Five is another step in that direction," said Shane Remington, chief operating officer of Peppermint.
According to the changelog, the "Keyboard and Mouse," "Keyboard Layout," and "Keyboard Shortcuts" applications from previous versions of Peppermint have been removed, the Peppermint Ice in-house built SSB manager has been rewritten and it now supports both Chrome and Chromium as a backend, and the Peppermint Control Center is the new settings app.
Also, a number of upstream bugs present in Lubuntu have been fixed, the network manager applet starts now properly, Peppermint-Light is now the new window manager and widget theme, and PulseAudio has replaced ALSA.
The developers have explained that there are still a few problems remaining with the distro, but they are minor one and they should be fixed very soon.
A complete list of changes and improvements for Peppermint Five is available in the official release notes. You can download Peppermint Five right now from Softpedia.
Like all new Linux distributions, it's recommended that you first test it in an environment where you can evaluate safely whether you want to install it or not, like VirtualBox.