Peppermint OS 7 Has Been Released, based on Ubuntu 16.04 and uses LXDE as the default desktop environment

The developers of Peppermint OS have announced the launch of a new version of the lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution. The new version, Peppermint OS 7, is based on Ubuntu 16.04 and uses LXDE as the default desktop environment.

Peppermint is an open source distribution of Linux based on the Lubuntu operating system, which is an official flavor of the widely used Ubuntu OS built around the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, which is also the default graphical interface for this distro.

Peppermint 7 (Peppermint-7-20160616) hightlights:-

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.
This time around whilst staying with LXDE core session management for lightness and speed, we’ve listened to our users who demanded a more modern, functional, and customizable main menu and switched out lxpanel in favour of the xfce4-panel and whiskermenu. We’ve also added a new ‘Peppermint Settings Panel’ to further consolidate settings into one place.
Due to Google’s dropping of 32bit Chrome and move to PPAPI plugins (which effectively ends flash support in 32bit Chromium) we’ve now moved back to the Firefox web browser for the first time since Peppermint One. With the Mozilla Prism project long since deprecated, moving back to Firefox entailed a rebuild of Ice (our in house SSB framework application) to allow Firefox to open SSB’s in a similar fashion to Chromiums ‘-app’ mode, so Ice now fully supports the creation and removal of SSB’s for Firefox, Chromium, and Chrome .. we ship with Firefox by default but you can choose whichever of these browsers suits you best in the clear knowledge Ice will still do the business.
We have a new look, flatter than previous editions (though not too flat) with a dark gtk theme by default and colorful icon choices, we’ve put together a small collection of images by the brilliant photographer Ray Bilcliff with his kind permission .. If you’d like to see more of his outstanding work, please visit: http://trueportraits.com/or his Google+ page (photos): https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/+raybilcliff
Because Firefox is known to have some issues with dark gtk themes on a few websites (such as white text on a white background in the Youtube search box) we’ve locked Firefox to a light theme independent of the system default, so we’ve also created a simple to use ‘Firefox Themer’ application which you can find in the new Peppermint Settings Panel, which allows you to unlock/relock the Firefox theming .. so the choice is still yours.
We’ve switched text editors from gedit to pluma because of the odd way gedit now handles windows decoration which leaves it at odds with the rest of the system theming.
There are many other small refinements squeezed into Peppermint 7, indeed a definitive and exhaustive list would probably make this announcement totally unreadable and deny you the excitement of exploration and discovery, so why not take it for a spin and see what you can find .. after all that’s half the fun right (?).

As with previous releases we invite you to compare Peppermint to other operating systems, we are confident you will be impressed. To take Peppermint Seven out for a test drive, please visit our website at peppermintos.com where you can download it for free. If you need help installing Peppermint Seven, or have any questions about using it, we have a second-to-none user support team at forum.peppermintos.com please drop in even if only for a chat with friendly like-minded people .. hope to see you there.

Additional information can be found in the project’s release announcement and release notes.

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