Looking Ahead to Peppermint Three

We at Peppermint HQ have been back and forth on the topic of putting out an updates version of Peppermint Two for quite some time now. At this point we’ve decided not to pursue such a thing and the reason is quite simple: It really wouldn’t accomplish much.

We took a look at a good many of the early bug reports and almost all of them revolved around a regression in the display manager that affected a relatively small number of users. We’ve left this unaddressed at the display manager in question, LXDM, has pretty much no new development as many people are moving in the direction of LightDM. The bigger issue is that Peppermint Two was built with LXDM in mind and changing this can cause all sorts of unforeseen issues, as were present when GDM replaced it in the most recent Mint LXDE release. Beyond that, the bug reports have been relatively few compared to Peppermint One, and we find it hard to justify releasing an updated edition at this particular point.

Right now, Peppermint Two is pretty darn stable and we’ve experienced no major breakages from updates or anything. Updates continue to flow in regularly and will for some time. About the only thing we really felt we might do different in a Peppermint Two respin was maybe changing one or two of the default web apps for others with cleaner interfaces. That’s about it.

Development on Peppermint Three will be beginning this week and we’ll be using LightDM for this one. We’re also looking into a handful of other minor changes, but we feel we have a good formula that’s working well for us and our users right now and we don’t want to risk undercutting that. Most of the work we’ll be doing will be concentrated on continuing to improve our interpretation of what we see as the best way to use a computer: light, fast, and web-centric.

Kendall Weaver