Ubuntu Derivatives News: Trisquel, elementary OS, Ubuntu Studio, Linux Mint, Peppermint, Bodhi, and Lubuntu
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-08 08:36:18 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-08 08:36:18 UTC
Trisquel
The developers take pride in the fact that Trisquel is a completely free operating system and it will remain free forever. The Linux distribution also doesn't integrate any applications that are not completely free.
elementary OS
Ubuntu Studio
Mint
The biggest challenge for Windows XP users switching to Linux Mint is having to change the programs you've known and used for years. Fortunately, some programs are available on both Linux and Windows. In addition, there are Linux programs that duplicate the functionality of your favorite Windows programs.
Some Windows XP users might be considering Linux MInt as a replacement operating system. But just replacing the operating system isn't enough, you'll also need Linux applications that will replace the ones you used in Windows. ZDNet has a roundup of Linux Mint applications that might fill the void when making your move from Windows XP to Linux Mint.
It's been a while since I've done a review. In fact, it's been a while since I've posted in any form, because this semester has turned out to be a lot busier than I anticipated. It likely will remain so until it ends; the only reason why I can post a review right now is because of spring break, and even that has been busy for me. Anyway, I initially wanted to do a review of Frugalware because it looked intriguing, but I couldn't get the live USB to work. I'm reviewing this (which I had planned for later) instead. If you've passed by this blog, you've probably already seen my thoughts on Linux Mint, so I'll skip the introduction. I tried this updated ISO file as a live USB made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it's like. There isn't too much that has changed since last year, so I will simply link the review from then, point out any changes, and put out any other thoughts that occur to me about this.
Linux Mint is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, but that wasn't always the case. Now, the creator of Linux Mint has just announced Linux Mint 17 “Qiana,” which will be released almost a couple of months after Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) is made available.
The MintBox 2 is a small form factor, fanless PC designed to run quietly at low power.
The machine features a die-cast, solid metal case which acts as a passive heatsink and cools down components without needing any fans. While the case design adds to the weight it reduces noise, with the only sound coming from the internal 500GB SATA hard drive.
Clement Lefebvre, the creator of the Linux Mint distribution, has just announced that the next version of the Mint operating system will be called “Qiana” and it should be available by the end of May 2014.
Linux Mint is one of the most popular Linux distributions out there and it's only superseded by Ubuntu. Actually, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and makes use of its repositories, but that may not happen for very long anymore.
Peppermint
This time however I have been lucky enough to get not just one member of the team but two. I recently sent an email to the Peppermint Linux team with a series of questions and what follows are the answers provided by Shane Remington (COO of Peppermint) and Kendall Weaver (CTO of Peppermint).
When I’m introducing someone to Linux, I don’t believe the “all or nothing” approach works, so if you are new to Linux and would like to see the benefits it can offer you, download and burn onto disk the latest version of Peppermint and follow these steps.
As you may or may not know, I have recently acquired a HP Chromebook and my first article about the Chromebook looked at whether it was possible to run another operating system alongside ChromeOS.
Today I am taking a look at Peppermint 4. Peppermint 4 is designed as a hybrid operating system aimed at cloud computing and also average ordinary everyday home use.
I last reviewed Peppermint Linux in August 2012 (Peppermint 3) and my overall impression then was positive. In this review I will review Peppermint Linux from scratch and I will also look at what has changed since version 3 to show how Peppermint has moved on.
Open source makes a lot of sense in rural areas and in third world countries. Lightweight and open source systems that are easy to use, and which allow normal users to become power users and contribute back to the open source community, can be ideal for countries like Cameroon, located in middle Africa.
As the program has grown over the past years, the cost of licensing for the video editing software has grown as well, beyond the operating budget of the organization. Faced with this challenge, PAGE turned to open source technology. Elizabeth McIntosh, a member of the Steering Committee for PAGE, led the charge. "I'd heard about the open source movement through my friendship with Brendan Szulik at Duke, and thought it might be able to help us." PAGE participants historically used Final Cut Pro to document and edit their digital stories, but this year will use open source alternatives Kdenlive and Blender. Both offer a good user experience, without the heavy scale-up costs associated with non open-source solutions. The ability to rapidly learn the technology and to use it as the program continues to grow are the largest benefits.
Bodhi
One of the things I am working on for our Bodhi 3.0.0 release this summer is a simple GUI system update tool written in Elementary and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. Today I would like to share an early version of this tool I am calling eepDater (pronounced epp-date-er), which is written in python utilizing the EFLs.
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As promised I've put together our first Bodhi Linux disc that is built on top of the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 release. Keep in mind this is a very early image not intended for production machines. There will be issues.
Lubuntu
Lubuntu is based on LXDE, a very light desktop environment that probably has even lower hardware requirements than Windows XP. It's a favorite for older systems and it's the lightest distro in the Ubuntu family.
Cleide Isabel! She managed to grab the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th place with her photos: 'Vista Do Fitz Roy', 'Vale', 'Arvore', 'Daisie' and 'Copan02'.
Lubuntu 14.04 LTS Beta 2 (Trusty Tahr) has been officially released and it has joined its brethren from the Ubuntu family, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu GNOME.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
- Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
- Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
- now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
- Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
- Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
- Gemini Links 25/12/2025: Hibernation and TV Detox
- Links for the day
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- The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
- Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
- Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
- Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
- The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
- older articles
- Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
- FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
- Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
- Links for the day
- Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
- Links for the day
- Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
- I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
- Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
- "Quantum" is the future
- The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
- The important thing is optics
- So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
- In light of recent experiences
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
- So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
- An "AI-Infused" Windows
- Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
- Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
- Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
- Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
- Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
- The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
- What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
- And as the Year Turns...
- The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
- Appliances Versus Computers
- Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
- A Dark Side of Europe
- They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
- Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
- I will continue to publish for many decades to come
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
- A Tribute to Richard Stallman
- It's about knowledge and sharing
- Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
- Links for the day
- Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
- They say the reason for the price surge is LLM hype/frenzy
- Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
- How did Ubuntu get so fat?
- The EPO is a Very Vicious Organisation You Neither Wish to Join Nor Stay in for "Too Long"
- Consider what the EPO thinks of its own workers, the staff that actually does real work
- 2026 Will Hopefully Turn Out to be Slopless
- we seem to be starting the post-Christmas period on the right footing
- Links 25/12/2025: Mail Carriers in "a Murky Future", Dihydroxyacetone Man’s "Chip Embargo Against China Backfiring Spectacularly"
- Links for the day
- The Register MS: All I Want For Xmas is Microsoft
- they actually put effort into it
- How to Win Nobel Prize for Peace
- Do you get to Heaven (or peace platitudes) by sleeping with 72 virgins?
- The Right to Repair (Especially When Products Are So Poorly Made)
- Many electrical appliances fail often/quick and are nearly impossible to repair
- Links 25/12/2025: Ample Cover-up Found in Jeffrey Epstein Files; ChatGPT Causes Psychosis, Not a Good Use Case
- Links for the day
- Giving Money to Free Software
- In life, people must make sacrifices to do what's right and just
- The Register MS: Don't Use Linux
- That really says a lot about The Register MS
- EPO People Power - Part XV - EPO Cocainegate to Resume This Weekend
- The next installment (number 16) will probably come out this weekend
- Microsoft: XBox is Going "Online", "Cloud"...
- XBox as a console is pretty much dead
- The Year of the Bubble
- We hope that in 2026 the marketing liars will find some new buzzwords to latch onto and quit calling everything "AI"
- Mozilla Firefox is a GAFAM Browser With Slop, Move to a Free Software Web Browser
- on mobile the options would be more limited
- libera.chat Was Under Attack Last Night
- Several months from now libera.chat turns 5
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raises Over $300,000 Before Christmas
- the FSF made it past $300,000
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- Sounds Like Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' (Slop) Ran Out of Money to Borrow
- Maybe in 2026 slop will be scarce enough that eventually, maybe by year's end, we'll manage to just ignore it.
- In India, Staff Works on Christmas Eve, Becomes Unemployed (Last Day)
- The company fires based on how "expensive" workers are more often than based on their productivity
- Links 24/12/2025: US TACOs on "China Chip Tariffs Until 2027", Russian Snickers in U.K. Convenience Shops
- Links for the day
- Links 24/12/2025: Cheeto President "Accused of Rape in Jeffrey Epstein Files", Windows to be Replaced by Slop?
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/12/2025: Tea, Love During Pain, and Gaming This Year
- Links for the day
- GAFAM is a Bubble, Nothing is Free in This World
- Nothing is free in the world
- My New CD Player/Stereo Didn't Even Last a Year, My CD Player/Stereo From the Early 1990s Still Works
- That helped reaffirm what I said in recent years about production/manufacturing standards of "modern" things
- GitHub Isn't Free, Microsoft Subsidises It (Losses) to Entrap You Inside Proprietary Software, Now Come the Fees
- GitHub was never free
- XBox Console is Dead, "Microsoft is Rethinking What XBox is"
- So XBox is now "cloud"
- IBM SkillsBuild: Teaching Slop to People
- What skills does that give? Making more slopfarms?
- Maybe 2026 Will be the Last Year of António Campinos
- Europe's patent system is run by thugs and it serves thugs
- 2025: The Year LLM Slop Rose to Prominence and Then Fell
- the slop hype is bound to end
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, December 23, 2025
- Links 24/12/2025: Spotify Surveillance and Shadow Over Rule of Law in Hong Kong
- Links for the day