14 DAY TRIAL // Pear OS was a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that imitated the Mac OS X desktop environment with great accuracy. It disappeared rather mysteriously roughly a year ago, and no one has heard anything of it ever since. Now, an image has been posted on a remote and obscure part of the Internet showing that Pear OS might be making a comeback.
It's not difficult to get people interested in the promise of a Pear OS return. The distribution was a very successful one and many users really enjoyed it. It wasn't just a look-alike with a fancy theme and a cool icon pack. Its makers also made a few of their own apps and quite a few of the components were custom built for the exact purpose of providing the same functionality as that in Mac OS X.
The imitation of another operating system is something that is done pretty often in the Linux world and it's not limited to Mac OS X. In fact, Windows systems are also targeted quite often and many of the visual features are implemented in Linux OS, most of the time just for the fun of it. The true merit of Pear OS is that it took this imitation to a totally new level, and it seems that it got in the way.
Is Pear OS really returning?
The way Pear OS disappeared overnight left a lot of questions unanswered. The makers of the distro announced one day that a third party bought the system, along with all the rights to it. They never said who bought it or what would happen with it. Pear OS was just gone in one day. There were some rumors that Apple might have had something to do with it, but nothing was ever proven.
Now, someone uploaded a screenshot on tinypic.com with a Pear OS X 1.0 version that mentions a build from November 2014. It might be someone having fun or someone that really knows how to tease the Linux community. In any case, from what little it can be discerned from the image, it could just be the real deal. The quality of the desktop matches what we would expect from Pear OS, but all those watermarks are strange.
Users should really take this information with a grain of salt and they should not make any false hopes. We'll try to dig up some more information about this Pear OS X, if it exists.
