Peppermint-8-20170527 is the latest stable version of the OS

May 28, 2017 21:02 GMT  ·  By

Mark Greaves of the Peppermint development team was proud to announce today the release and immediate availability of the Peppermint 8 GNU/Linux distribution.

Based on the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and the HWE (hardware enablement) Linux 4.8 kernel and graphics stacks from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), which includes the X.Org Server 1.19 and Mesa 17.0.2 packages, Peppermint 8 is here in its final, production-ready state to conquer your personal computers with a highly customized MATE desktop environment.

"Team Peppermint are pleased to announce the latest iteration of our operating system Peppermint 8, it comes in both 32bit and 64bit editions with the latter having full UEFI / GPT / Secure Boot support, a new version of Ice (our in-house Site Specific Browser framework) is also included with full Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, and now Vivaldi web browser support," reads today's announcement.

Here's what's new in Peppermint 8

Peppermint 8 comes about six months after the release of the last Peppermint 7 Respin images, which means that the development team had time to tweak the graphical interface, package selection, as well as add some nice functionality to it. For example, there's now an "OEM Install" option implemented in the boot menu, allowing computer vendors to offer the Linux-based operating system to their customers as default OS.

Another area that has been improved in Peppermint 8 is the handling of the keyboard layout, which now lets users easily configure it, as well as to swap between multiple layouts directly from system tray using the Left-Alt+Left-Shift keyboard shortcut. Moreover, volume management was added by default to allow automatic mounting of external drivers and playback of DVD-Video discs in VLC.

On the software selection side of things, Peppermint 8 switches back to the Chromium web browser by default with the pepperflash PPAPI flashplayer plugin included, though it's still possible to install Mozilla Firefox using the "Firefox Theme Lock" utility, with the addition of a dark GTK+ theme. MATE Calc calculator is back as well, and Xfce's Task Manager utility replaces LXDE's LXTask.

Other than that, Linux Mint's Xed text editor and Xviewer image viewer replace MATE's Pluma and GNOME's Eye of GNOME, respectively. NFS (Network File System) support is now available out of the box, along with support for exFAT partitions. Of course, several small UI tweaks were added to fonts and the desktop and icon themes. You can download Peppermint 8 right now from our website.