 So, I've taken a look at Peppermint OS before, but I don't really remember much about it. And I think that most people are probably the same. Peppermint OS is one of those distributions that is just kind of there and has been for a very long time, but what do you really know about it? Well, we're going to take a look at Peppermint OS today again, it has just recently been released with a brand new back end of Debian 12, so it should be fairly interesting. I haven't been playing around with it for a little while and I have to say it's weird. It's not the weirdest distribution I've ever seen, but they've made some very, shall we say, interesting decisions over the things that are included in the distribution. So, we're going to go ahead and talk about Peppermint OS today and before we do, if you would be so kind as to leave a little thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. So, what is Peppermint OS? Well, at its base, it is a Debian-based distribution that is focused on minimalism. And when I say minimalism, I mean not extreme minimalism, like there is a desktop environment here that uses XFCE, but minimalism in the sense that they've very blatantly chosen not to include a lot of the things that you'd expect inside of a distribution. So, we're going to talk about some of that here in a few minutes. So, just know, going in, that this is a very opinionated distribution when it comes to the packages that are installed. That being said, I will say this. They have done some really nice work with the design of XFCE, which actually makes it very nice to use if you're interested in a very minimal XFCE setup. And going into it, and I'll actually show you this now, you can see right out of the bat that there is just a very calming, I would say, it's just a very nice aesthetic to the entire system. There's nothing too crazy here. There's no odd cursors. There's no crazy bars along the top or widgets all over the place. It's just a bar along the bottom, a menu along the side, and a task bar on the other side. That's really all there is. There's not even multiple workspaces other than like the two that are included. So, obviously, it's XFCE, so you can change any of the things that you don't like about this. But out of the box, I really do like the aesthetic. But before we talk any more about that, let's talk a little bit about the installation because one of the things that we talk about when it comes to Debian is the pain of installation sometimes. I talked about this in my last Debian video is that Debian is as hard to install as you want it to be. So, there are situations where Debian is easy to install. There are Calamari's installer for proper Debian, but you have to go hunting for those things. Their website is a mess as everyone seems to be figuring out lately and trying to find those easy installers in terms of the Calamari's installers can be kind of painful. If you're using the regular installer, the live version is also not the easiest to use, and then there's the expert installer, which is actually much harder to use, right? So the range of easiness when it comes to Debian is all over the place. With Peppermint, it's a Calamari's installer, and I'll show some of the B-roll of the installation right here. Then it is a standard Calamari's installer. The only thing that I will say about this particular install process is that the little selector that you can use to change the file system seems to be broken, and by broken I just mean that they've truncated the options, and there's one option there that you just can't read. It just has the first letter and the last letter, and you kind of have to guess what it is. I'm not sure what that is. I still don't know. The options seem to be, outside of the one that I can't read, EXT4 and XFS, I think. I do like that they have this drop-down menu that gives you an option to choose a file system. That is very nice because proper Debian will allow you to choose other operating systems doesn't make it easy to do so. Now I will say this though. I wish that Peppermint had given you the option of ButterFS because ButterFS is the superior file system, but that's not an option. It doesn't mean you can't use it. It just means that it's not automated like you would see in something like Endeavor or Manjar or something like that. So the installation is a proper Calamari's installer. There's nothing really all that special there, but it does just kind of show you that they've tried it to make Debian very easy to install. And here's another thing is if you go to their website, there's a download link right there. It just downloads the ISO. That's all you have to do. You don't have to go searching for the ISO. Now they do have a different version that is based on Devuan, but Devuan is basically Debian but without system D. So if you'd rather use Devuan or a proper version of Devuan, you can do that. This one here is the regular system D sporting version. So that is the installation. Let's go ahead then and talk about the system itself. So when I do these types of first looks, reviews, whatever you wanted to call them, I don't really, this is not a review, so we won't call it that. But when I do these type of things, I try to answer a couple questions. Is it good? Who's it for? And why did they create it? Well, we can start with the why they created it for in the first place. As far as I can tell, basically what they wanted to do is to create a Debian installed that is as minimal as possible without being so minimal that you basically end up in a TTY to begin with. So you have the very bare minimum stuff here in order to create a desktop environment and a distro. Right? Other than that, there's nothing out here. Now, I'm going to put a revised on that and say that they did include some things that are a little weird. And they also didn't include some things that are a little weird. And we'll talk about that here in a minute. The idea is to create a very bare minimum install of Debian, but call it peppermint OS and then kind of design it so that it looks and feels and functions very nicely. That's the whole purpose. And that's the reason why they've created it now to move on to what is it. We'll have to get into the things that are included. Now, usually the idea behind a distribution can be very summed up into two different areas. Look and feel and applications that are included. Those are the two things that really do make up a distribution that is based on something else. So, well, we can talk about the package manager and all that stuff. All that stuff is going to be the same as on Debian, right? In terms of package availability and all that stuff, it's Debian underneath hood. So if you're familiar with Debian, the package availability and the package manager, all that stuff is going to be exactly the same. What makes peppermint peppermint is going to be the choices that they've made in terms of look and feel and packages that are included on the ISO and then installed once you installed it. So in terms of look and feel, I've already talked about that a little bit. It just looks really nice. There's a very understated minimalism that they've got going on here. There's no over-the-top shadows or animations or anything like that. It just looks nice. So the look and feel is what it is. And then we need to talk about the applications that they've included. So when I was looking at this last night, I was convinced that they did not include a browser. Now, the thing is, is that I'm still pretty sure that they didn't include a browser even though, as you can see, I haven't advocated to a web page here. I would challenge you to tell me what this browser is, okay? So I had no clue what this browser is. Now I thought maybe it was V, but I thought maybe it was Q-Browser. There are several other very interesting browsers that are very keyboard-centric out there that I've used in the past. I thought maybe it was one of those. It's not one of those. And the thing is, is that if I go to this, I cannot scroll. You cannot use your mouse to do anything other than clicking this. You can't scroll. You have to use the Vim keys, which is perfectly fine by me, but it's definitely not something that I'd consider user-friendly out of the box because how are you supposed to know? Because you have to know the key. Like if you wanted to open up a new tab, you could do so by using the key binding and then you can use the Vim keys to navigate around, but it's not something that regular Joe non-Vim user is going to know. So I've made this challenge. What do you think this browser actually is? I'm going to give you a second and then I'm going to tell you because it's interesting because I want to talk about it for a minute. So this browser, if you were to do an exprop, so I did an exprop here, basically this will just allow me to tell you what the class is. The class tells you that it is LuaKit. Now, when I saw that, I was like, yo, well, that's going to be Veeb because I'm pretty sure Veeb is written in Lua. I might be wrong about that. Maybe I'm misremembering. So I just thought that maybe that was what it was and but it's not Veeb. So because if you go to the menu and you just search for browser, you're going to get something that's called web browser. Now that's just going to be a sim link to whatever that is because that's an XFCE feature. The idea behind it is you can just kind of click on web browser inside the menu and it'll take you to whatever the default browser is. So if you have Firefox and Firefox is set as the default browser, you click on web browser, it opens up Firefox, right? That's an XFCE thing. It does not actually list what this browser is. What is this browser? It drives me nuts, right? So I spent some time trying to figure out how do I figure out what browser is because it's not called LuaKit. It's not called, it's not Q browser because if you search for like Q browser QUT or if you want to search for Veeb like so maybe it's maybe I spelled it wrong. I don't know if you know it's either way it's not there. What's the browser? Right? I know it was driving me insane. So I figured out a way that I could figure it out. So if I'd search for default applications, it shows you that it's the Debian sensible browser. Now what though is the Debian sensible browser? I've never heard of such a thing. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I'm sure there's probably like four people in the comments section below. Oh, I've used the Debian sensible browser for years. It's fantastic. You should definitely try it out. I've never heard of this thing before and it kind of freaked me out because I thought I had heard of all the browsers. Now that may sound a little bit arrogant, but I guess it kind of is, but I've used many, many browsers over the course of my lifetime and I've never, I've even used Debian many times. I've never heard of the Debian sensible browser before. And well, there you go. I can't say that anymore because that is the Debian sensible browser. And I know I've kind of gone on about this for a while, but that's just one of the weird kind of choices that they've made, right? There's no Firefox. There's no Chromium like that. Now I wouldn't expect that Google Chrome to be here. You know, this is very much a very free and open source project. They're not going to have anything that's going to be proprietary here for you to use. You can download those things obviously, but by default it's very, very free. And maybe that's the reason why they have included Firefox. I don't know. It's very rare for a distribution to not include some major browser, whether that's Firefox or Chrome or whatever. Usually the distribution includes some kind of browser. And this one here includes the Debian sensible browser, such as it is. Not sure that I know anybody who uses it. If you use the Debian sensible browser, leave a comment in the comment section below. Tell me why you use it. I don't know anything about it. I had no clue that it existed until today. So I would very much like to know. If it's good, maybe I should definitely give it a try. I don't know. Anyways, so that's one choice that they've made. Another choice that they've made, if you go through some of this stuff, is that they've installed some things that are very popular, but also makes you question if they didn't include a regular browser, why they've included things. Things like image magic is here. Now, a lot of distributions include image magic. It just kind of stands out as one of the options that they've made here. They have something called Kumo, which is a SSB, which is a, I'm pretty sure that's SAMBA, so that's remote access to different folders on remote servers or clients or whatever. That's the only thing in the internet category, by the way. In terms of multimedia, you get the Pado control, which is to control the volume. That's it. There's no media player here whatsoever. In terms of office, you get things like orange calendar and all orange global time, which is a world clock. Really weird choice, right? You've included those things. This is a minimal thing that you have created. You didn't include a browser, but you've included a calendar. That makes sense. Right now, they didn't include a browser. When I made my notes last night, I had no clue that Debbie and Sensible Browser was even on here. The only reason I found out was that I was here in the welcome portal and clicked on one of their links. And it was like, wait a minute. I thought that there was an actual browser here, but it opened up a browser. What is this thing? Then I freaked out for a little while. I'm much better now. Anyways, if we go back here, there's no multimedia. The office is those really weird calendar and clock things. And then it just is a whole bunch of settings for XFC. That's basically all there is to it. Now, I'm not sure whether or not XFC normally comes with A-rander or not. I don't think that it does, because why would it need to? Because the XFC has its own display settings section of its settings panel. So I don't know why A-rander was installed explicitly. But that seems to be the only other thing that they've chosen to install. So the choices that they've made here are a little weird, given that they've chose to go super minimal, right? If they were not going to include Firefox in an actual browser. I'm not going to, I don't consider Debbie a simple browser, sensible browser, an actual browser. If they're not going to include an actual browser, they've made the decision to go that minimal. Why also include a calendar and a world clock, right? And those are things that they explicitly install. Now, here's the thing is that I talk about this a lot when I do these district things, is that the choices that the developer of the distribution makes usually is decisions that they're making for themselves that just kind of get passed on to the rest of us. Maybe that's the situation here, and that's fine. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. That's basically every distribution, the developers make it for themselves and then share it with everybody else. And those kind of decisions just kind of get made for us, which is the way of a distribution, right? Maybe that's what it is here. It just stands out to me that they've installed those two applications and not, you know, a regular browser. So in terms of actual overall things that are installed, I will say this, it is very, very minimal. You know, it's probably one of the most minimal distributions that I've seen that actually has a desktop environment on top of it. Now, you can obviously install a Debian as a server distro, you can install Fedora, and then you just boot into a TTY, and then you have to install everything from the ground up. That's not this, it's taking it a step further, where Xorg is actually still here or actually is here. You can use XFC. It has all the stuff that you need in order to get there to have a more functional system without being so super minimal as like a server distro. So if we take a look at NeoFetch here, one of the things that I will say is that it includes NeoFetch out of the box. Like NeoFetch, you've made a minimal distribution, but you have included some things, and NeoFetch is one of them. They've also installed them, which I think is fantastic. Them should be a default everywhere. But if we take a look at this, we'll see that it's using Bash 5.2, the kernel 6.1. These are all Debian bookworm numbers, by the way. It's using XFC 4.18, and then it has some of the information there based on the theme and the icons that it's using as well. Now, the memory here is misleading because I've opened up some stuff. And it turns out that if we look at top here, the thing that's using the most memory does seem to be Xorg and WebKit. So the Debian-sensible browser uses just as much memory and stuff as any other browser. So it's not spectacular in that. It's not different in that aspect. So the last thing that we want to talk about is the peppermint hub. Now, the peppermint hub is weird. I'm just going to go out and say that it's weird, because it is a place where you can access some of the settings of your distribution. So things like network printers, disk utilities, Hblock, which is an ad blocker, pulse audio, and things like that. So on the left-hand side, you have general system options. That part there is superfluous. It's definitely unnecessary because XFC actually has its own settings manager. It looks like this. If you've never seen this before, this is the settings manager. So the peppermint hub doesn't really need to have links to all that, but it's fine. It doesn't have access to everything, so there's still good chances you're going to have to come in here anyways and know if you want to change the settings. The part that interests me here instead is the software tools. So if we select the suggested packages, you can click on these and install packages that are suggested for you. So things like installing Flatpak, things like installing Snap, things like installing the GNOME software if you want a proper software front-end. You can install TimeShift, which is going to be an R-sync front-end in this case. It's not because they don't have ButterFS, so you'd be using the R-sync backup in TimeShift. You can do that. Installing the browser, or the Conquer. I'm not sure why they recommend Conquer as one of the browsers, but OK. GNOME Web is here as an option, so that gives you those. Tor, Qt browser, Chromium, Falcon is another browser that hardly anybody uses. So they've recommended some things that you should install here as suggested packages. Now, when you click on App Image Hub, that's just going to be a link to the website for App Image Hub. There's not an actual launcher here associated with it. That's basically FlatHub, but for App Images. Synaptic is installed, so I didn't actually show you this. So if you're familiar with anything Debian, Synaptic Package Manager isn't oldy, but a goodie, and allows you to basically install anything that is associated with your repositories. So that's Synaptic Package Manager. And then it's just, these here just link again to the website. So if you want to actually do anything, I mean, to me here, this seems, these are completely unnecessary. Now all those do is just provide you information on the stores themselves. If you wanted to go to FlatHub, it does show you the website and all the packages that are available through FlatHub, but you're not going to be able to install them until you click on the suggested one. Now, here's the thing. In the Peppermint Welcome thing, they do have a link to that thing that we just saw. So if you are not like me and you actually read these things and you talk, you look at the Peppermint Hub and you look at the documentation and all that stuff, if you actually pay attention to the welcome screen, you're going to see this right out of the box that, you know, oh well, obviously it doesn't have Firefox installed if it's going to give you a link to install it. So let's actually just go ahead and do that. It's going to open up a terminal. It will install Firefox ESR, which again Firefox ESR is a Debian default. So they've taken that out and required you to make the choice of installing it, which is fine. It's a minimal distribution. It's supposed to be a user created post install. So everything that you want to install, you install yourself. So if you are to the normal person and you read the welcome page, you would see this here and you know that there are certain things that you need to make a choice on, right? If you want to use FlatPacks, you have to, you know, you have to install FlatPack and then do that. And then what I'm unsure about, and I'm actually going to find out right now is FlatHub FlatPack install, let's just say Audacity. No, actually I gotta, you gotta actually spell things correctly, Matt. So it does not enable FlatHub once you click that button. It feels like that's a missed opportunity. If you're going to have a button here to install FlatPack, you should also have a button here to enable FlatHub. Snap wouldn't have that problem because once you install Snap, it has access to the Snap Store because there's only one Snap Store, right? FlatHub FlatPack is a little bit different in that aspect. So like I said at the beginning, Peppermint OS is a very interesting distro with some interesting choices. It is a very, very, it's very, very minimal, okay? So I don't think that I can emphasize that enough. It is very, very, very minimal. They've made some weird choices with things that they have included. Weird as in they stand out because nothing else is included, I should say. Like Neofetch and them aren't weird choices, but usually when you're creating a minimal distribution and you've made it so minimal that Firefox isn't installed, you wouldn't also include those things, right? Those things seem weird because they stand out as installed when nothing else is, if that makes any sense. So Peppermint OS is a very interesting distribution, I think. If you're looking for a Debian-based distribution that is super minimal, I'd say definitely give it a try. It does enable quite a few Debian repositories. So like the Debian stable repositories are there. The backcourt repository is enabled by default. So you can go into the sources that listen and see that those are enabled by default, which is a good choice, I feel, but it's definitely something that you kind of have to keep in mind if you're going to want to deal with where your software comes from. So that is Peppermint OS. I really like the layout of it. I like the, if it weren't so minimal, I'd say it would be a very good beginner's distra, but because it has no Firefox out of the box and it has some really weird choices when it comes to installing third-party package management systems like Snap and Flatpak, and you kind of have to know how to set those things up, it's not that great of a beginner's distro, but not everything has to be a beginner's distro so that I can't really judge it for that. So that is Peppermint OS. If you have thoughts on Peppermint OS, you can leave those in the comments section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. 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