It's a bit earlier than expected, but the Peppermint OS 7 GNU/Linux distribution has been officially unveiled today, June 24, 2016, based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
Peppermint OS 7 has been in development for the past year, and it comes as a drop-in replacement for the Peppermint Six version, which was officially released back in May 2015. It is distributed as 64-bit and 32-bit flavors for all computers, but the 64-bit one also offers complete support for UEFI/Secureboot systems.
Peppermint OS is a lightweight, stable, elegant, and fast computer operating system based on GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies. The latest version, Peppermint OS 7, borrows a lot of packages from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS distro, which means that it will also be a long-term support release, and it uses the LXDE desktop environment.
"Along with the shift to the 16.04 (xenial) code base, Peppermint 7 continues our policy of choosing the best components from other desktop environments, wherever that may be, and integrating them into a cohesive whole with our own software," reads today's announcement.
Here's what's new in Peppermint OS 7
Release highlights of Peppermint OS 7 include a new version of the well-known Ice Site Specific Browser framework, allowing users to install the latest versions of the Mozilla Firefox, Chromium, and Google Chrome web browsers, Whisker Menu as the default Application Menu, and xfce4-panel as the main panel replacing LXPanel.
A new Peppermint Settings Panel is now in place to let you configure your system more easily, and Mozilla Firefox is the default web browser because Google dropped support for 32-bit Chrome on Linux. Then, the artwork has been improved and a darker theme with a flatter, but not that flat, look it now provided for the whole system.
The newly introduced Peppermint Settings Panel offers a Firefox Themer application to enable users to change the theme of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Moreover, Pluma replaces Gedit as the default text editor, and there are also the usual under-the-hood improvements to further optimize the performance of the operating system.
Download Peppermint OS 7 right now via our website.
