The distribution is based on GNOME 3.10, but it can be upgraded to GNOME 3.12

May 13, 2014 08:02 GMT  ·  By

The Pinguy development team has just announced that Pinguy OS 14.04 final version is now available for download, featuring a number of new packages and a serious overhaul of the system.

Pinguy OS 14.04 Full edition is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), but the developer chose to depart from the base distribution and adopt GNOME 3.10 as the desktop environment, with a few changes.

The developers of Pinguy OS wanted to make something different from what users can find right now, and one of the ways they can achieve that is by implementing an interesting selection of applications.

For example, the latest Firefox 29 has been included as the default Internet browser and all the plugins for Netflix, Flash, QuickTime, Divx, Java, Hangouts, and so on should work without any problems. The latest VLC 2.1.2 has also been included as the default media application.

To make things even more interesting, the final version of Pinguy OS 14.04 shares many of its features with the Mini release, with the exception of a few default applications that were not featured in the smallest distro.

“Pinguy OS uses GNOME Shell 3.10 by default, customized with extensions such as Gno-Menu, Media Player Indicator, Top Icons and more. It comes with many useful applications and tweaks by default.”

“The distro also includes TLP (a tool that applies various tweaks to your laptop to save battery power), zram-config, preload (a daemon that stores the frequently used files in memory for faster startup times) and Profile Sync Daemon, among many other tweaks,” reads the official announcement.

Other applications that have been included are Shotwell 0.18.0, Variety Wall Paper Changer 0.4.17, Steam 1.0.0.45, PlayOnLinux 4.2.2-1, Pinta 1.3-3, Rapid-Photo-Downloader 0.4.10-1, Deluge 1.3.6, Empathy 3.10.3, Skype 4.2.0.11, Thunderbird 24.5.0, Calibre 1.35.0-1, LibreOffice 4.2.3, HandBrake 0.9.9, Clementine 1.2.3, DeVeDe 3.23.0, Wine 1.7, Dropbox, Plex, and much more.

Pinguy OS developers also warn users that some things are still broken, but they will probably get fixed soon with various updates. For example, Apturl is broken (a problem in the Ubuntu base), in Firefox some of the Add-ons are disabled, selecting auto-login in the installer does not work, and if you want to add extra Extensions you will need to remove Restore-Extensions from startup.

A complete list of changes and improvements can be found in the official announcement. You can download Pinguy OS 14.04 Full right now from Softpedia.