14 DAY TRIAL // In a brief Google+ announcement, the Peppermint OS developers have informed the community about the possible upcoming availability of the Peppermint 7 Linux operating system.
Not many of you out there have heard of Peppermint because it hardly sees the light of day with announcements or press releases. So we will take this opportunity to inform you that Peppermint is an Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution, with the current stable release being Peppermint 6, based on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (Trusty Tahr).
It's a lightweight, well-designed, very fast and stable computer operating system that you can install as your daily driver on either a laptop or desktop PC. It also looks like Peppermint aims to be a long-term support (LTS) release only, so that's why we only see news from this part of the GNU/Linux ecosystem so rarely.
Peppermint 7 is coming soon
Now that Canonical has released its new LTS (Long Term Support) operating system, the Ubuntu 16.04, it's time for the Peppermint developers to rebase their OS on the Xenial Xerus branch and drop yet another long-term supported release, the Peppermint 7 (Seven) series.
Therefore, they are happy to announce June 30, 2016, as a preliminary launch date for final Peppermint 7 release. In the meantime, it appears that the Beta testing is taking place privately, not publicly as the community might have expected from an open-source project.
"Please be aware that this is currently only a 'penciled in' date, if any new bugs come to light, etc. the release may be pushed back until they are fixed. That said, the private beta test hasn't brought up any show stoppers so far, so fingers crossed," said the developers.
Anyway, there are only ten days left until Peppermint Seven hits the streets, so there's no need for a public Beta anyway. The developers have also informed the community that the website might enter maintenance mode for a short period before the possible June 30 launch.
Please note that you won't be able to update from Peppermint 6 to 7 without deleting your current installation, as there's currently no upgrade path available, which means that you will need to perform a full install. Also, Peppermint 7 comes only with 64-bit UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support, as well as non-UEFI and 32-bit computers.