Passing of Mark Greaves

Our friend Mark Greaves passed away on January 14th. Mark was a longtime contributor to Peppermint and became its project lead and CEO in 2015 during the release cycle of Peppermint Six and was its greatest contributor in all the releases that followed including our latest release of Peppermint 10 Respin just a couple months ago.

Among the best in our community Mark joined Peppermint in 2012. As PCNetSpec he frequently answered support questions in our community forum before anyone else had the chance. With 26,466 posts he remains our most active contributor and dearest friend.

We invite friends to leave comments and memories here or in the forum announcement.

Mark is survived by his wife Jayne and two sons Dan and Marcus who have created a memorial fund is his name. Everyone is welcome to visit that page for more information on how they can contribute.


Team Peppermint is dedicated to continue Mark’s legacy by supporting Peppermint 10, building our community and plan to release Peppermint 11 later this year.

This Post Has 10 Comments

  1. Said Bakr

    Indeed bad news. I hope that the team will be able to complete his way.

  2. Johan

    I hope they can find a maintainer.

  3. Joseph Willis

    It is the nature of people to not appreciate what they have until it is gone. I think Mark falls under this category. I have been a silent part of the Linux revolution since Red Hat. Those who have developed Linux into a viable desktop os that compares to MS, or Apple are true treasures. Sadly we fail to recognize them and thank while they are still here. Thank you Mark, and Mark’s family, for this was a passion for him and it showed.

    1. spence

      Sadly, as with most things in life appreciation often comes too late. Fortunately in Mark’s case, his heirs were flooded with messages of condolences. They were flored as messages about how Mark’s steadfast devotion to Linux and PeppermintOS poured in from all over the world.

      Happily, the family gives their blessings as #teampeppermint ponder what comes next for PeppermintOS!

  4. JU KOMOL

    I googled lightweight linux distro, and found peppermint. Later, I found his interview on ubuntu forum. Indeed it’s a great loss for this community. We will miss him and his contribution to this community.

  5. Waldo

    Sadly, PeppermintOS is awesome work.

  6. Sam Sepiol

    Hope his vision be carried along by his teammates.
    He did a great work in the field of technology.
    May he rest in peace.

    1. grafiksinc

      We hope to keep it going….Thank you for your kindess

  7. John Crompton

    Regrettably, the new team dishonoured Mark Greaves’ labour of love by junking what he had so assiduously built in favour of something “better” according to them. All the hopes expressed here about continuing Mark’s legacy have been betrayed by the inheritors of the Peppermint OS project. Leaving no path to upgrade smoothly except the monstrous, Windows-like, ‘format and install’ way to the “new” Debian / Devuan was a big middle finger to all the users who had invested their time and trust in the Ubuntu based distribution.
    May Mark find peace in the hereafter.

    1. grafiksinc

      @John Crompton – Thank you so much for your honest comment. It seems more out of frustration that Peppermint is no longer based on Ubuntu. In reality no one would really truly knows what Mark’s direction would be now. If anyone tried to assume his thoughts it would purely be speculative. To kick the team like that just because of frustration is a bit harsh and it does not really add much value to the conversation .

      Being that the project is opensource it would be better to contribute than throw punches, that way you can at least make a difference. Up until Peppermint 10 it was based on Ubuntu, and I agree it was a wonderful journey, even prior to Mark being the Peppermint lead up until version 5 it was ran by other developers out of North Carolina. What was the value add that Peppermint Ubuntu based brought to the community, easy to use, new user focused, desktop only, all of the great stuff that came with Ubuntu desktop, 32/64 up until Ubuntu did not support 32 anymore. Like many other operating systems there was many preinstalled applications to Peppermint. Then there was the ICE application that requires only a certain set of web browsers that can be used with it.

      All of these things generally is something that many many other distributions already do. At that point what further value could Peppermint add that other operating systems do not already provide. You have to think beyond themes, wallpaper and desktop environment, and packages……truly what separated the Ubuntu based system from other distros. People would say its light weight and great for old hardware, that’s no different than many others available , you could argue it was not bloat free since it came with predefined software installed.

      Where as if you look at Peppermint today it is true we do not just focus on new users, as that is truly unfair to not think about the veteran users in the community. It may not be perfect but we try to strike that acceptable balance of new and veteran users.
      What do we offer today

      1. A 32 /64 bit Debian system, 32 would be non existent if we were still on Ubuntu that’s value add
      2. We offer a Devuan base many community members simply do not want systemD providing choice is value add.
      3. We offer ARM architecture that never existed before in Peppermint , its a value add for those users that need that technology
      4. We will offer a server version of Peppermint pre-configured server ISOs to help users in the community to have a system they can use for server needs. That’s value add
      5. We ship with nothing installed except most common firmware it’s not perfect but is saves time for users. That’s value add.
      6. Because we ship with no packages a user does not lose time uninstalling a lot of packages they do not use. But we also make acceptable methods to easily install software. Again….value add

      Often times folks will say well you can just do that with vanilla Debian which is true but Debian will not pre-configure or help you configure anything so that’s time loss in some ways.

      I cannot change your view and it is true we did move in a more free and open source direction that is way more inclusive than just focusing on the Desktop and new users.

      At the very least we can show that we have added value where others do not. For that I think Mark would be proud.

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