 Today I'm going to be taking a look at the recent release of Peppermint OS. Peppermint OS has been around for more than a decade, so it's kind of an old Linux distribution. For most of its existence it was based on Ubuntu, but here in the last couple of releases they are now basing off of Debian. And because Debian just released Debian 12, of course you're going to see all of these Debian-based distributions starting to release new versions based on Debian 12. So let's switch over to my desktop here. I'm going to run through a quick installation and take a first look at Peppermint OS inside a virtual machine. So let me go ahead and boot. I do like the splash screen. That's very nice. And we boot into our live desktop environment. Now it should be noted that Peppermint OS is an XFCE Linux distribution. And I say that because many things have changed with Peppermint over the years. I mentioned it used to be based on Ubuntu. Now it's based on Debian. It also used to be a LXDE XFCE hybrid desktop where they'd use the LX session, but they'd use a lot of the XFCE panel and tools and things. So it was kind of a mixture of two desktop environments, LXDE and XFCE. But now they've dropped all the LXDE stuff and it's just a straight XFCE desktop environment. And I really like this welcome application. This is pretty slick here. Now one thing I don't see here in the welcome application is a button for installing Peppermint OS. So if you're going to have the welcome application auto start, you know, before you actually get the Linux distribution installed, it'd be nice if you had an install button in the welcome application. But that's just, that's a minor gripe. I don't know how difficult it would be for them to add that, but they do have this desktop icon installed Peppermint. So let's go ahead and click on that. And it launches the Calamaris installer. So let's run through a quick installation. Let me hide my head here. So we have American English as the language for the installer. I'm going to click next because that's correct for me. And then it has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'll just click next on that. Then keyboard, I'm going to be English US, which is already chosen. So I'm just going to click next on that. And then partitioning our drive. Do I want to erase the disk and give the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine over to Peppermint? Or do I want to do some manual partitioning? And that would be useful if you were going to boot alongside another operating system, maybe dual boot alongside Windows, for example. But in this case, in this VM, I'm just going to do a race disk and let Peppermint OS have the entire virtual drive in this virtual machine. Now, do we want to swap? In a virtual machine, I don't really need a swap, but if I was doing this on physical hardware, I would create a swap. Typically, I do swap to file. And then we also have this dropdown here for our file system. By default, it's going to do extend for, but it looks like if I wanted to, I could do F2FS or XFS as well. But I'm going to stick with the tried and true extend for. I'm going to go ahead and click next. And let's go ahead and create our username. I'm going to call my user DT. What is the name of this computer? So this is the computer's hostname. I'm going to call it Peppermint-vert. If I ever SSH into this machine, I'll know exactly which virtual machine I'm SSH-ing into. Now let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and repeat the strong and complicated password. Do we want to log in automatically without asking for a password? It's ticked off. I'm going to leave that ticked off. You want to have to enter a password to get into any computer. And that's for privacy reasons. Nobody should be able to just come up to your computer and like open your browser and then go to your bookmarks and things like that. That could be very dangerous. Always require a password. I'm going to click next. And we get our summary here and everything looks good. Time zone, location, keyboard, partition scheme. So I'm just going to click install. Now this portion of the installation typically takes about 10 minutes on my machine. So I'm going to step away, grab a cup of coffee. I'll be back once Peppermint OS has finished installing. And the installation of Peppermint OS has completed. That took about 10 minutes. Now when you're done with the installation here in the Calamaris installer, you want to make sure that this checkbox here restart now is ticked on and then click done. And it should automatically reboot the machine for you. And it looks like in this virtual machine it will not automatically reboot because I got this splash screen that I'm assuming was the operating system trying to shut down, but it just hung here. I've been waiting for about a minute. So I'm actually going to go ahead and force the virtual machine to shut down. So I'm going to force it off. And now let me see if I can manually restart it. Yep. And it does look like the installation was successful because we have a grub menu and we get to our login manager. It looks like they're using LightDM for their login manager. So let me enter my super secure password. And we are in the XFCE desktop environment before I go any further. Let me go ahead and launch the display program and change the resolution to 1920 by 1080. Click apply. Do we want to keep this configuration? Yes. And now every time I launch this virtual machine, it should remember that I always want this to be 1920 by 1080. So first impressions of Peppermint OS. It's a very attractive desktop, right? I really love the themes as far as XFCE and the GTK theme, the welcome application, like the wallpaper, right? It's an attractive kind of design, right? It's kind of a minimal distribution. You can see their logo less is more, right? Being XFCE kind of a minimal desktop environment, right? It's not trying to be too wow and over the top, but it is a rather attractive distribution. Now in the welcome application, I do love the look and feel of this thing. Let me click on some stuff. So select packages and web browsers. So let's click on that and we get a second window here where we can install things like Atroll, which is your document viewer, PDF viewer, Parole, which is a media player, GFW, which is the graphical version of UFW, which is the firewall, snap package program, flat package program. Okay, well, those are probably some of the more interesting things to actually enable. So let's see if we can get snaps enabled. So let me enter my sudo password and it is installing a few things here. Hopefully after that we should be able to install snap packages. And now let's do the same for flat packs. And once again, enter sudo password. And it's going to install, I'm assuming, flat pack and its dependencies. Suggested web browsers. We have Firefox, Conqueror, Epiphany, Tor browser, Kube browser, Chromium and Falcon. Does it not ship a browser by default? It does not. That is interesting. So for purposes of this, I'm just going to install Firefox ESR because I would think probably most Linux users probably use Firefox or Firefox based browser. So let's go ahead and install that just to make sure it installs correctly. And I think I'm done with this now. So I'm going to go ahead and close that. And then we have the peppermint hub. And this is for system changes and customizations. So what is the peppermint hub? So it opens a second window again. And okay, this is kind of like your control panel, you write your settings panel for like your desktop environment or whatever, where you can make changes to networks and printers and you can get your system info, you can add users and groups. We have software tools. One of the software tools, obviously, we're going to have the snap store and flat hub because we enabled snaps and flat packs. App image hub is also here. So if I click on that, I'm assuming that would open in a web browser. It does. Is this like a, this is actually more like a web application, right? Actually, it looks like it's actually cute browser because I notice we have kind of like a Vim kind of a most like a Vim or Emacs kind of mode line at the bottom. If I hit O for open, yes, this is the cute browser opening app image hub. That is interesting because I did not see cute browser under internet, but we now have Firefox ESR under internet. But that is cool that they have links to the snap store flat hub and the app image hub as well. We also have a link to synaptic, which is my favorite Debian based software center, if you will, because it's, you know, not too flashy and gaudy. It's rather nice and peppy because it doesn't include all those screenshots and all the animations and everything. It is just a very nice package manager lists everything in the repositories. If you want to search for a package, you can search for a package with the search button here. For example, each top. I don't know if each top is preinstalled or not. It doesn't look like it because if each top was installed, this would be checked here. So I could mark each top for installation and then I could hit apply and it would install each top for me, but I'm actually not going to install each top that way. The reason I'm not is I'm going to open a terminal. Since I know each top was not installed, let's see if snaps actually work. sudo snap install each top just to make sure that it did enable snaps for us. We're also going to check make sure it enabled flat packs for us as well, but it does look like it's working correctly. So let's go ahead and wait for the installation of each top to complete and then we'll run each top just to make sure and that completed. Let's go ahead and run each top. It says command each top not found. I'll do a snap list. Each top is there. It says warning snap bin was not found in your path. If you have not restarted your session. So I may have to restart this machine before we can actually get that. But before I restart the machine, let's also do a flat pack install of something. So let's flat pack install gimp. I don't know if gimp is installed or not. And it looks like note that these directories are not in the search path as well. So you may have to reboot for flat pack to work as well. Let's go ahead and do the reboot. That way we know snap packs and flat packs are working. It says reboot command not found. Well that is interesting that they don't have that alias, but we'll go ahead and go into the menu system. And I'm going to choose the log out button here and shut down. And now that we've restarted the VM. Let's see if each top installed as a snap now works. It does not. That is interesting. Wonder if it would appear in the menu system. It does not. Let me up arrow and see if I can get flat pack install gimp to work. No remote. Well maybe gimp isn't there. Flat pack install discord. Yeah. So even though they have the buttons to enable snaps and flat packs, I'm sure, you know, I could get this working. But the fact that you have, you know, this here, I would think you should just click the buttons enter your sudo password and everything should just work. The fact that it doesn't, I would consider that a bug. Also in the welcome application you have a peppermint online documentation, which I'm assuming would just open up the cute browser once again. Just kind of weird that cute browser is not in the menu system at all. Now again, they could just be treating this as standalone web applications and not necessarily a browser itself, but it's definitely cute browser. But I am glad that they include the documentation here. So I'm going to close that out. And then we have the build log, review the build log. I'm not going to do that in the peppermint community. So we have links to I'm not sure what that icon is that source forage icon. I could be wrong about that. That's mastodon. I don't know what any of this other stuff is, but let's go ahead and close out the welcome application. Let's go ahead and navigate through the menu system and see what is installed out of the box. So under accessories, we have our application finder. We have the bulk rename tool, the flip board manager disk. Now is that GNOME disk? I believe it is. If I go to about disk, yeah, disk 43.0. So you have part of the GNOME suite of applications. So most of these applications, of course, are going to be XFCE applications, but disk obviously is a GNOME application. We have the menu editor. So this is to edit the menu, obviously, right? So this is a XFCE tool for you to be able to edit this menu. We have our screenshot application or task manager. We have the file manager, which is through NAR, the default file manager for the XFCE desktop environment. And one thing I notice is it doesn't show hidden files. If I view, I click on show hidden files, yeah, because I hate that file managers by default hide the hidden files. I know they're called hidden files, but really, you know, they really shouldn't be hidden. I get I get the original concept. But these days, I think most Linux users, once you're past the brand new user stage, you're going to be using a lot of these dot files, these config files, you're going to be editing them and playing with them. If I ever create my own Linux distribution, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to enable show hidden files in my file manager. That's one of the things I'm going to do. Also under accessories, we have X archiver, which is the archive manager for zip on zip, things like that, light DM, the greeter settings. So this is to be able to edit your light DM login greeter, the appearance, you know, the wallpaper and things like that, the look and feel of the login manager. Also under accessories, we have mouse pad, which is the default plain text editor for the XFCE desktop environment. This is mouse pad 0.5.10, a very simple plain text editor. Honestly, if I was installing a plain text editor, I'd probably want something better than mouse pad. Even GNOME's G edit is much better than mouse pad. I'd probably go with something like genie though, genie, fantastic plain text editor. We also have the orage global time. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, but this is for clocks, time and date and things. I've never actually played with the program, even though it is installed on a lot of XFCE distributions. We have plank for a dock. That's interesting. I did not know that would use a dock. The dock is at the bottom. We should probably move it, either move the dock to the top or leave the dock at the bottom and move the panel to the top. I wonder if I right click on the panel, move the panel, see if I can actually do that. That would have removed the widget, which is the taskbar. How do I move the panel? It's been so long since I've actually done anything here with XFCE panel preferences, maybe. Have display, horizontal, vertical, lock panel. Maybe we need to unlock the panel. There we go. And now I can move it to the top. Yay. I figured that out. Now lock the panel back. We could leave the dock down here, but let's close the dock. Would control all T, bring up a terminal. I'm going to run at X kill, then I'm going to click on the dock to kill the dock. And let's go back into accessories and restart plank. And now it'll be flushed to the bottom because before it wasn't flushed to the bottom because it had to respect that the other panel, the XFCE panel, was already at the bottom. So yeah, I'm just going to leave that running. Also under accessories, we have VIM. That's very nice that they installed VIM out of the box, although they don't install H top out of the box. So be nice if they did that as well. Under graphics, we don't have much here. Document scanner for scanning, image magic, which image magic is a dependency for a lot of other graphical applications. And under internet, we have Firefox ESR, which is the browser we chose to install and Kumo, which is the simple SSB launcher. SSB stands for site specific browser. Think of it as a web application designed to look at a specific website. So you guys have seen these web applications that are designed for, for example, for Wikipedia, because I've shown some of those on camera before. It's a web application that all it does is search Wikipedia and browse Wikipedia, that particular URL. And then we could create something like that here. So give this SSB a name. Maybe we only want to search my website, which is distro.tube. So let's do distro.tube. Enter the URL. HTTPS colon slash slash distro.tube. And now that I've created that, we can select a SSB to manage. There's distro.tube. If I hit run, it's going to launch this site specific browser. Yeah, again, using looks like cute browser, right? So I could manage my website. And, you know, this is just to view my website here, right? So if I hit open, oh, on the keyboard to open here inside cute browser, would it actually navigate to another side if I wanted to? Yes. So it's not like you're locked into just browsing that site. If you know how cute browser works, you can navigate to other sites as well. But that is a pretty neat program. So this is Peppermint's Kumo program for these SSB type applications. Back to the menu system that is now at the top of the screen here. Under multimedia, we have pulse audio, volume control and nothing else. So we do need a media player. Remember in the welcome application, it did ask us, did we want to install parole, which is a video player we chose not to, but we would eventually probably need to install something to play music and to play videos for me. I'd probably just install something like VLC, which works both for music and video under office. We don't have anything here. But again, if you need an office suite, of course, you can find LibreOffice in the repose. And then settings, it's your standard XFCE settings stuff, really nothing to see here, nothing that's out of the ordinary under system. This is some of your system configuration stuff, including the GDB package installer. So that is to install Debian packages.deb packages that are not in your repo. Maybe you find them online and you need to find a way to load these things. GDB is how you get those things to install. We also have G-Parted here, which G-Parted, I understand why G-Parted should be on the ISO as far as part of the live environment. I would suggest probably removing G-Parted after the distribution is installed. Rarely should anybody be playing with a partition editor once they've actually installed the operating system because you could run the risk of a new user trying to play with that thing and seriously damaging their machine. Now, let me do a control alt T to bring up the terminal. Once again, I'll zoom in and let me do a sudo apt install htop. It didn't look like snaps and flatpacks were working how install htop using the native Debian package, right? So now htop, we're using XFCE, which is a pretty slim desktop environment. You can see we're only using 650 megs of the six gigs of RAM I gave this VM and that's after I've played around a lot here, right? I've opened a lot of programs. There's actually quite a few things running in the system tray and that's still really light on ramp 650 megs. So that is the beauty of XFCE, very light on resources. Let me make this full screen. I'll clear the terminal. Let's do a uname dash R. We're going to use six dot one for the kernel. That's the latest LTS kernel, of course, being based on Debian. That's what kernel the Debian 12 release was using as well. Let me do a apt list dash, installed to get a list of everything that was installed as a Debian package via the apt package manager. Now, now that I've got that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to up arrow. I'm going to pipe all of this output into WC dash L WC is the word count program dash L means give me a line count rather than a word count. What it's going to do is there was 1509 lines in this output from the apt list installed output. That means there's 1509 packages installed via the apt package manager. Some other things I might want to check. Let's do a where is pipe wire here. Pipe wire is not installed. So we're strictly using pulse audio. Obviously, Wayland is not here. XFCE does not have a Wayland component at all, right? It has to run on X11. So this is strictly Xorg. And one final thing I want to do is I want to right click on the desktop and let's go into desktop settings and go check out the wallpapers, the background. So it looks like they only have four here, but these are very nice wallpapers. A couple of these I have seen before, but they are very nice photographs. Yeah, I really like that one. Yeah, very nice. Got the trees blooming there, the mountain in the background. Honestly, I think the best of the bunch was the one they went with as the default wallpapers. So I think I'll just leave that as it is. So that is the latest release of Peppermint OS. This was released on July 1st, 2023. Again, Peppermint OS now based on Debian 12. They also do a version based on Devwan, but they have not released a new version based on Devwan just yet that will be coming later in the year. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Maxim, a homie's too bald, Matt Mimic, Mitchell Paul, Royal West, Armored Dragonbash, Potato Chuck, Commander Henry, George Lee, Marchman, Methos, Nate Euryon, Paul Peace, Archon Vador, Polydate, Relatis for a less-read profit, Rolandos, Devlar, Williams, and a bit these guys. They're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Peppermint OS would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.