What is Peppermint?
It is a community distro, for all age groups and abilities.
Our core value is to offer a minimalist desktop, giving the individual the choice of what they want to install, beyond a few base tools and custom themes and icon sets.
It is a bare-bones OS, with no firewall, browser, office or media player. This reason, is each community member has their own idea of how and what they would like to install to their computer.
Debian our flagship release and Devuan both come with extensive software repositories that cover the majority of everyone’s needs, should you require something not in the repositories, you may enable it from the flatpak, snaps and appimages repositories. These are third party software.
Our Peppermint tools have been built using tkinter, and pyqt to help our members set up their computer and install suggested packages on their desktop. In the future we will endeavor to improve these tools with community feedback. We have integrated Debian/Devuan into our Peppermint desktop vision and ultimately meld it to do things our way.
The beauty of using the Debian/Devuan base is, you can install once and when your computer reaches its EOL in 10 or 15 years time. The choice being yours to upgrade and install, no need to LTS reinstall every two or three years.
Due to our CI/CD methods (DevOps) we will cover later, allows us to give continuous improvements to our tool-set, that can filter down to existing installations, without the need for a reinstall or download a new ISO. Like our GUI Update Manager to pull Codeberg (git).
We have started a Wiki: https://sourceforge.net/p/peppermintos/pepwiki/wiki%20home%20page/ this is an evolving library of tutorials to aid our members.
Ditto with community generated post install scripts, we do plan to use them in future additions of Peppermint, along with that community members that are currently contributing to build a 32bit ISO based on our current code-base… its amazing what we can do when we all come together. This really shows the power of an engaged community. Our documentation is updated with more details than it has ever been kept before using Sphinx Document Generator..hosted our on Codeberg that Community members can contribute to.
Peppermint was very much a one man show the past few years , but we have moved on and evolved from the waterfall method to DevOps Principles and Best Practices.
In a nutshell, this means Dev team and community are one body. Takes us back to the first few sentences, what is Peppermint and its core values. It has always been a minimalistic distro with signature custom tools such as Nemo and our own themes and icon sets.
A era brought a different set of criteria and challenges, everyone had an opinion. After many sleepless night and effort from everyone, a plan slowly evolved towards DevOps, dedicated to meeting a standard set of goals, particularly in developing software. With a willingness to adopt its values and principles and adapt them to fit our organizations (the community) vision and needs.
Software designers use DevOps to speed up the time to deployment, apply required incremental improvements in response to unexpected changes, all set in a CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) pipeline. The net result is a more streamlined development process.
DevOps the technical nuances.
1. Gain the stakeholders’ active participation as soon as possible – the community.
2. Developers and testers should test code often and early, using automated testing – we spent all of 2021 setting up this processes for the team.
3. Make sure users have development support after we release new builds as best we can with the community.
4. Keep code repositories regularly updated and ensure that updates are continuously integrated into the workflow – we are still working on this with the CI tools but we are getting there.
5. Build, test, and release code faster via continuous delivery – we can already do this as seen in the days after the release.
6. Quickly bring in new features by taking advantage of continuous deployment tools – we are already getting ready to release new features.
7. Automate, Automate, Automate what we can. we have an automated deployment process.
Devops Creates a Collaborative Environment
Embraces development and operation to engender an atmosphere of collaboration, team work and unified community goals. Encouraging communication’s to brainstorm and share ideas, plus solve problems together.
Foster Continuous Improvement
Like life the community changes as does technology, we strive to release improved code base to continuously work to improve its performance, compliance, and speed. Thus, the final product release doesn’t end the story; the team keeps an eye on the application and ensures it stays relevant in a changing world.
Don’t Be Afraid to Fail. Learn From It
No one likes to fail, of course. But rather than treating failure as a personal blow, we must change our attitudes and see failure as a chance to learn something. In other words, learn from mistakes. After all, errors inevitably happen; may as well get some benefit from them!
It’s All About the Community
If we don’t have a community, we don’t need to create peppermint. DevOps culture helps keep an ear open to your voice, maintaining pace with the always-changing needs.
We hope that helps give transparency on the mindset we have taken.
If you do have any questions don’t hesitate to let us know
Thank you all for what you do!
Empowering the planet with Linux is our goal. Join us in this journey.
Development Team
Tommy (grafiksinc) – Developer Lead
Packaging Team
Manuel Rosa – Maintainer, Packaging and Delivery – our partner and project lead over at (AçorOS)
Communications Spokesmen
Cavy
Website & Hosting
Joseph Dickson (josephd) – Website Administration – Joseph is a WordPress developer in Los Angeles California and maintains the Peppermint OS website. When he’s not running websites he’s distro hopping lightweight Linux distributions. Blog, Twitter, Website
Trusted Users
Peppermint’s Trusted Users provide community support and leadership
rwcanuck, Dan Kelly, alynur, stevesveryown, Adam Hughes, VinDSL
Thank you for your service
The following members are fondly remembered for their tireless efforts to bring us minimalism and the choice for the end user to add what they felt what they needed and the way they wanted to configure their computer.
Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec), Brian Tomlinson, Robert Wood, Shane Remington, Kendall Weaver, , Spence, Andy Mitchell, clatterfordslim, Graeme Duncan, Mac Dahlin, Slim.Fatz, jlschwartz, lswarte, murraymint, perknh, Darknetmatrix, Ray O Sullivan (rayzer), KsWoodsMan, “Jonesy” (James Jones), manyroads, MintSpider – Peter Paterson, John Faulk
dolphin_oracle
Rest in Peace Mark Greaves, we remain guided by his minimalist ethos; “Everything you need and nothing you don’t.” A direction our team continues as we move forward. We are also grateful that his family have expressed a wish that the Peppermint OS project continue in his honor.