Peppermint OS Six released

Peppermint OS Six released

Peppermint OS has long been known for its ability to blend desktop and cloud applications into a highly attractive and eminently usable Linux distribution. The latest release is Peppermint OS Six, and you can download it right now.

Mark Greaves at the Peppermint site made the official announcement:

Peppermint is excited to announce the launch of our latest operating system Peppermint Six. Lightweight and designed for speed, Peppermint Six delivers on that promise whether using software on your desktop, online, or using cloud based apps.

Initially, Peppermint One was designed out of our desire for an operating system optimized for working online. Each year since then, we have improved on it, and we are very excited about new and improved features in Peppermint Six.

Peppermint Six Highlights

Peppermint 6 is still built on the 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support) base, but we’ve moved to the 14.04.2 “point release” which includes the 3.16 kernel and an updated graphics stack. (this is to sidestep the upstream 9 month support issue that comes with basing on the not LTS code bases). We’re now using the Nemo file manager, which gives some nice new features including the ability to handle custom nemo action scripts, better desktop management, easier mounting and management of remote network shares (including Windows SMB shares, WebDAV, FTP, SFTP over SSH, etc.), and a smoother overall experience. Along with our policy of not sticking with standard LXDE components where better choices are available, we’ve dropped the LXTerminal in favour of Sakura which allows tabbed terminals, scrolling, and Gtk+3 color handling including background images. The Update Manager has been replaced with MintUpdate, but with the same settings as update-manager, so the bottom panel update shield makes a comeback. In line with user feedback and proven format handling Guayadeque and Gnome MPlayer have been replace with VLC as a “one app to play them all” replacement. The default image viewer has been changed from Mirage to the eog (Eye of Gnome) image viewer. The xfce4-power-manager has been replaced by mate-power-manager and i3lock replaces light-locker as the default ScreenLock which was causing problems for some users. We’ve moved to the Gnome Search Tool which has a more intuitive user interface, and finer grained control of search criteria. The new Wallpaper manager (based on nitrogen) now makes wallpaper management a breeze, just right-click on the desktop and select “Change Desktop Background” and you’ll see what we mean. The ability to right-click any image file and choose “Set as wallpaper” is also still present. Linux Mint’s USB creation tools “mintstick” are now included by default, making the creation of LiveUSB’s from isohybrid ISO images and the formatting of USB sticks as simple as it gets. Peppermix is our new window manager and widget theme, and for all the dark theme lovers out there (and we know you are legion), we’ve included a dark version “Peppermix-Dark”. Smaller tweaks include 2 new keyboard shortcuts:- PrtSc = save a whole screen capture to your desktop Alt+PrtSc = save just the active window to your desktop The addition of a right click “Calculate MD5 Checksum” context menu item The activation of the F4 = “Open Terminal Here” Nemo accelerator And various bug fixes.

More at Peppermint

If you’re new to Peppermint OS, be sure to check out the official User’s Guide to help you get your feet on the ground with it:

Thank you for choosing to download Peppermint as your operating system. This simple guide should help you to get up and running in as little time as possible, going over the basics of making a bootable CD or USB drive then installing and setting things up the way you like them.

Chapter 1 – Download and Install Chapter 2 – An Intro to the Desktop Chapter 3 – Customizing the Desktop Chapter 4 – Installing and Removing Software Chapter 5 – Site Specific Browsers and the Ice Application Chapter 6 – Additional Reading and Resources

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Cinnamon 2.6 released

The Linux Mint developers have announced the release of Cinnamon 2.6. This release offers a range of improvements including significantly better performance in terms of responsiveness, load times and CPU usage.

Clement Lefebvre made the announcement on Segfault:

On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 2.6! This new version will be featured in Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” planned for the end of June and in LMDE 2 “Betsy”.

A huge amount of work was done to review the CPU usage in various parts of Cinnamon and many improvements were made. Performance was gained by optimizing how Cinnamon reacts to particular events and reducing the number of tasks or repeated tasks it performs. The menu, for instance, is refreshed about 6 times as less as before… signals resulting from connecting a USB device are grouped together and lead to 1 action, reducing 4 concurrent reactions into a single one. The docinfo part of Cinnamon, which handles “recent files”, was optimized a lot. We found out tiny features such as generating thumbnails for “recent” files in the application menu were very expensive in resources and dropping them led to significant reductions in CPU usage. Un-necessary calculations in the window management part of Cinnamon could also be dropped, leading to reduced idle CPU usage (about 40% reduction in the number of CPU wakes per second).

Loading times were also reviewed (this covered Cinnamon and MDM) and found to be excellent, except for the case where Cinnamon is loaded for the first time after a computer restart or shutdown. Whereas a normal Cinnamon initialization would typically take between 0 and 2 seconds, the very first one could take up to 40 seconds on some of our test systems. The reason was a lack of HDD read-cache, especially when it came to Gio appinfo and icon themes data. To reduce this initial load time, Cinnamon 2.6 introduces a preload mechanism which loads themes and app info asynchronously earlier on during the boot sequence. Distributions using non-standard icon themes ca

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Linux Mint users reacted to the announcement in the comments section:

Crewp: “Congratulations Clem, and the whole Mint team, this is the best Cinnamon yet. I think that your decision to move Mint to an LTS base for LM, and a Debian stable base for LMDE is already paying big dividends. I can’t wait to see what you all come up with next. :)”

JosefG: “Great developments! I love the fact that Nemo will carry out copy operations serially. We have been needing this for a long time. Is it possible to pause a copy operation after it has been launched to? That would be icing on the cake.”

Mrman: “Amazing acheivement. Cinnamon is definately my fave DE, not just because it is actually the best taking the perfect line between Gnome 3 and Gnome 2 ( i.e usable yet still modern and flashy ) But mainly because you actually listen to what people are asking for and implement it sensibly.”

Sam Burgos : “I like the theming and redesign of the settings, it feels much smoother than ever, may I ask what language/design/sketch did you use for it? Or is it Gjs/Cjs? I would like to learn to create something like that for some personal project and I do really love the design of it.”

Exploder: “This is the best Cinnamon release yet! Thanks for all of the time and effort that went into it.”

More at Segfault

XCOM 2 coming to Linux in November

Feral Interactive has been working on XCOM 2 for Linux, and the game should be available in November.

Silviu Stahie reports for Softpedia:

XCOM 2 just received a new trailer to announce the game and the launch date, but there is no gameplay in sight. In any case, when the game is released in November, all the platforms will be covered, and that includes Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

“XCOM 2 transports players 20 years into the future, where humanity lost the war against the alien threat that has established a new world order. The secret paramilitary organization known as XCOM is largely forgotten, and must strike back to reclaim control of Earth and free mankind from the aliens’ rule. XCOM 2 is currently scheduled for release in November 2015. The game will also be coming to Mac and Linux via Feral Interactive,”…

More at Softpedia

You can check out the official XCOM 2 trailer in this video:

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