 Peppermint OS is one of those Linux distributions that I've never actually taken a look at on the channel before, and I thought that it was time for that to change, specifically because there's a brand new release of it out. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to be taking a look at Peppermint OS PCNet spec edition. Now the reason why it's called that is because it's actually named after the username of the guy who originally developed Peppermint OS. He passed away a couple of years ago. So this has kind of been a release that is dedicated to him. So what I thought to do today is take a first look at this because I've never actually used it before. So I don't know much about it. So let's go ahead and jump in now. Before we do that, just know that I'm trying out Vert Manager today. I've only used it a little bit before in the past and I'm not that familiar with it. So expect things to go wrong. I'm just going to point that out because I'm sure that it's going to happen. I mean, it's just almost guaranteed. So let's go ahead and take a look. So let's go ahead and hit begin installation. I think this should work. So this is Peppermint OS and let's first see if we can change that resolution. Let's go ahead and look at this. So the first thing we should look at and see is if we can actually install this in because this is the welcome screen. It should come up when we've actually installed the system, which we're going to do first. We'll click on this. So this is the Calamari's installer. It's a very good installer. So let's go ahead and click next. American English is fine. That's an appropriate time zone. That is a fine keyboard layout. We will click erase disk. Interestingly enough, there's nothing here for swap or anything like that. So I'm assuming that that's not an option and that you wanted to do it manually. And there is an option here to encrypt your system, although it is really hard to see with the way they have seen this. So you can hardly see this little area right here, which is encrypt system. If you want to do that, you'd have to click the check box here. I don't need to do that. Oh, you want to, when I talk about swap, it does swap automatically so that you don't have an option to not do swap. That's an interesting decision. So we're going to go ahead and hit next. If I can do it, we'll enter our credentials here. Fine. And this is Peppermint OS VM. And we'll enter a very strong and complicated password. And then we'll hit next again. And then install. And it should start installing. Now, I will go ahead and cut the video here and come back when it's done. Okay, that is done. Now that took about two and a half to three minutes. So it was a very quick install. So let's go ahead and hit done. Now I'm not sure if the manager will remove the ice. So we're not. So we're going to have to see if that actually works out. I'm not sure how that works. We're going to learn together. Let's hit enter. See if that actually, it looks like it did fine. All right. Enter our password and we'll go through and do the display thing again. The biggest change from what I've read is going to be that this distro has moved from being based on Ubuntu to being based on Debian itself. So that is a huge change because it's basically being based on a completely different operating system. There are going to be several changes that you would experience being based on something like Debian than what you'd be if you were still based on Ubuntu. The biggest one of those things is going to be that the repositories that you have access to. So you're going to be moving from having all the Ubuntu repositories available to you to having the Debian repository, just the Debian repositories available to you. So that's probably the biggest change from what I've seen. Now if we take a look at the other release, the release notes for this, we'll see if we can make this bigger. This welcome screen is also new, which we'll go through here in a minute. Also the peppermint hub combines peppermint settings and control center for managing your system. And then some additional changes. So LXD components have been removed in flavor of XFCE. Now I don't know if that means that they've moved from LXDE to XFCE. I couldn't tell you that. What seems like they've had components of LXDE in there and then moving all to XFCE, but I don't know if that's a complete change or not. They've moved from the Ubiquiti installer to Calamars. That's a consequence of the change of moving from Ubuntu to Debian. Interestingly enough, they've replaced Thunar, which is the default XFCE file manager with NEMO, which is actually the Cinnamon file manager, which I highly approve of because NEMO is way better than Thunar. And here's a really interesting choice that they've made. They don't have a web browser installed by default. That's something that you actually have to do. And I kind of like that simply because it allows people to make that choice. Now it's not going to be for everybody. Most people, when they install Linux distribution, want at least one web browser installed so that they can access the internet right away. But by giving this choice, you don't get embroiled in any browser wars. Like when Manjaro, Cinnamon, decided that they were going to test installing Vivaldi out of the box. It pissed a lot of people off by not installing a browser at all and letting everybody make their own choice. You're not involved in that war at all if there can be said to be a war. Things chromium these days anyways. So what we're going to do is actually go ahead and install a browser and see what this looks like. So I've clicked on this thing, but nothing came up. We'll close that and come back here. And interestingly enough, that button does not work. What about any of these other buttons? Nope. Okay, so none of the buttons in the welcome screen seem to work. That's a little disappointing because this is one of their new features you'd expect the things to work. I'm going to close this and see if I can actually open it up. It won't close either. So it's actually frozen. Interesting. So let's see if we can open paternal control T and we'll zoom in here and run H top. H top is not installed. Actually we'll just do X kill. Oops, we're going to make this smaller. Try again. There we go. We got that killed. Let's see if we can actually go through and find that again. Welcome. Yeah, there we go. Now let's see here. Oh, here we go. This is going to work now. Okay. I don't know why that froze. It may be just something to have to do with a virtual machine. So we don't want to actually go through and bash peppermint just because something froze because it could be a virtual machine problem. So let's see here. So despite what the button says, which is install web browser, there's actually other stuff here to choose from. So you can things like the math decal calculator, parole, GPIC view, transmission bit torrent client and so on and so forth. But we also have a list of browsers here. So we have Firefox, conquer, get on web, Falcon, Tor browser, Midori, Q browser, Lua kit and Chromium. Interestingly enough, Brave is not on there. So that's an interesting choice that they don't have. So they don't have a list of all the browsers you could possibly have. So we're just going to go ahead and choose Firefox, but that is a small list of browsers that you can choose from. If you wanted to choose something else, you could obviously install it the traditional way. So let's go ahead and install selected. I don't need any of this other stuff. Oh, before I move on, you should should see that this also has snaps and flat packs that you can install, which indicates that those things are not installed by default. Okay. That took about a minute or so. So not too bad. So let's go ahead and close that. And then we have peppermint extras. So we get some peppermint themes. It seems to be install all or nothing, we'll just go ahead and install those and see how long it takes. Okay, we're going to go ahead and hit install. I'm not actually sure if that was a successful install or not. That went by too fast to actually see. And this window is actually still open up. So we're just going to hit cancel there and then cancel there. And then you can also install icons and wallpapers will install the wallpapers install. I'm not sure why the why this part here isn't just automatic. If it has to be, if there's only one option, if you've already clicked install, you shouldn't have to check it, hit check, whatever this is. You should just check it and then install the stuff. You've already hit install or it should at least ask you if it's a confirmation of do you want to install this stuff, then it should say confirm you want to install this stuff, not something random that you don't know what it actually is. And then it should go away. If you've actually, like I've already installed that stuff, I'm just clicked install again and it's installing it again. It should say done instead of just keeping this up there completely. So that's it. It's nice that it's there, but it's not necessarily the most greatest thing. So we're going to close this. All right. So anyways, we've already, we lost the welcome screen somewhere along the line. Okay. So we also have ice tutorial here, learn how to use ice to create and manage your SSBs. And then we have open pep hub, which is going to be their, their control center, which will allow you to basically provide shortcuts to certain XFCE settings. So for example, the appearance settings here, this is just to choose a different theme. You can actually go through and change your keyboard, change your power settings, change your panel all from here. And then you can also open up the XFC settings manager from right there as well. So that is the pep hub. It's cool, but it seems superfluous. It doesn't really seem like it's something that actually needs to be there because you just provide a link to the settings manager. All that stuff is there anyways. So that's the welcome screen. That is brand new for this release. So H block is also included. So that's a terminal based ad blocker. It can be enabled or disabled at any time. And that's pretty much it in terms of new features. So let's just go ahead now. And this was the new features that we were talking about. I just mentioned H block and that's pretty much it. That's the last thing on the list. So we can close this. And then I'm going to actually go through and do an update here and see if there are any updates. So there were a few updates have gone ahead and done that. Now I'm going to do a reboot. And when we return, we'll check and see the memory usage, the kernel and all that stuff. Password. It did remember the display settings, which is good. And we can actually that disappeared for an interesting reason. I don't know why that disappeared. I was going to click. Don't show again, but it decided just to disappear on its own. So it doesn't matter. So we're just going to open up a terminal here and we'll do uname dash a. So now this is going to be based on Debian 11. So we're expecting a kernel that is fairly old at this point, but it's going to be very stable. So this is based on Debian stable, which is called bullseye. So and when we do uname dash a, we do see that we have a peppermint OS branded kernel that is version 5.10.0. So again, this is fairly old, but it's going to be very, very stable. So then we're going to run neo fetch, which is installed by default. So we have a very nice ASCII art there. So this is running kernel 5.10. As I said, it has 1525 packages installed by default is running bash 5.1.4. This is running XFC 4.16 with the XFWM for window manager. And then you can see all of the associated themes and icons and stuff there by default as well. Now, if we go through and do free dash M clear this out, it's using 439 megs of RAM out of the box. And if we run H top, which we installed, which we didn't install earlier, install that now, if I can actually enter the password correctly, holy moly, if I can't get that password right, what can I get right? We'll go ahead and run at each top now, it has 68 tasks, 134 threads. It's using about 445 megs as we said before, and CPU usage seems to be pretty much idle. So that is in terms of performance from what you can tell via the basic beginning statistics. So we'll go ahead and close this, close window, and then we're going to go ahead and take a look at some of the applications. So all applications we have from what it looks like so far, most of the stuff is just going to be the XFCE stuff by default. So the Firefox that we installed is the SR version. We have going on disks here, this is going to be the XFC desktop settings manager, decomp editor, color profiles. And then we have GW package manager to install that packages, G parted to control your petitions, H top, which we just installed, the ice program that you saw in the the welcome screen, the icon browser keyboard, not a lot of actual programs here. We have the peppermint hub, which we looked at earlier, the power manager is just going to be the XFC stuff all that most of the stuff here is just going to be links to stuff in the XFC settings manager, possibility of volume control, the synaptic package managers here in order to install packages, that's going to be their app service. We have the XFC terminal, and that is pretty much it. Interestingly enough here, I don't see anything to play like videos out of the box. I don't see a music player at all. I don't see like a chat application or a DVD burner, which is almost always included in a Linux distribution, there is not much here out of the box. And that's not anything wrong with that. I just want to point that out. There's nothing wrong with that. This is a very, very minimal Linux distribution. And it's kind of like a Debian based distribution that you can build up completely on your own. You can choose what media player you have, what text editor, browser, all the stuff you get to choose. So it's kind of like arch in that way, I guess, you go through and just kind of install the stuff that you want. So that is a very brief look at peppermint OS PC net spec edition. If you're looking for a very minimal Debian based distro, you probably won't find one that is more minimal than this one. Now, personally, I'm not sure who this distribution is pointed at. Other than the people who want something minimal and Debian based, that is easy to install because Debian, well, isn't it isn't hard to install. It's definitely not using the Calamari's way of installing stuff, which is super easy. But outside of that crowd, I'm not sure who this is for, simply because I don't see how it could possibly be aimed at new users without some kind of software center, simply because the synaptic package manager is not all that easy to use. And most people aren't going to know how to use it or even know what it is. Like new users just aren't going to know that. And it seems to be either installing it that way or installing your software through the terminal or hoping you get lucky and find that all the applications you want are on that application install screen that you get in the welcome square center, which you're only going to discover actually has anything else. If you actually click on it to install a browser, which you may not do because you may want to install the browser through the software center or through terminal or whatever. So you may never even click on that. A lot of people ignore the welcome screens. So I'm not saying that this is a bad distribution at all. I think it's probably a really good distribution. I'm assuming and I can't vouch this because I'm just looked at it for the first time now, but I'm assuming that because it's based on Debian stable, it's going to be a very, very stable distribution. And if you can go through and get all the applications that you want to use, you're going to be set up for a distribution that's just going to be rock solid in terms of stability. So that is it for this video. If you have questions or comments, if you've tried Peppermint OS and you really enjoy it, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Today, Devon Patrick Marcus, Megalyn Jackson, I have a tool. C of A, Subrager Linux, Derek Mitchell, Arts Center, CarbonDade, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martinie, Merrick, Camp, Dressley, J.Dog, Peter A, Cruisible, Gartman, at Sixth Planet and Primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.