(http://www.blogcdn.com/www.downloadsquad.com/media/2010/05/peppermint-sdf.jpg)
Several big sites have been blogging excitedly about Peppermint OS. ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez referred to Peppermint as "A new Linux OS for the cloud," but is it really? I decided to download and install Peppermint so that I could find out for myself.
What I found is that Peppermint is very similar to dozens of other Linux distributions out there: it's a remix of Ubuntu with a different set of pre-installed applications. What makes Peppermint a "cloud" OS? Really, it's the inclusion of Mozilla Prism and a handful of web apps packaged as SSBs (site-specific browsers).
Does that really qualify something as a cloud OS? I'd say no -- it's really no different than putting shortcuts on a distro's desktop or launcher which would open those same web apps in the default browser. Dropbox is also included, and while that is cloud storage I wouldn't say its presence turns a Linux distro into a cloud OS either.
Peppermint isn't tightly integrated with a cloud backend the way Chrome OS or Jolicloud is. And heck, if you threw Prism and Dropbox on a Windows XP system and called it a cloud OS people would point and laugh.
There was a time when "yet another Linux distro" (no offense intended) would have been quickly shrugged off by non-Linux tech bloggers. Is the fact that Peppermint wasn't ignored a sign that attitudes toward Linux are changing? Or does it just tell us that if you throw the word "cloud" into your PR materials that more people are willing to pay attention?
http://peppermintos.com/