The Porteus boot menu offers some interesting options. The mechanism to transfer Porteus onto a USB is the same as Slax: loopback mount the ISO and copy its contents onto an EXT4 formatted disk before running a script from inside the USB to make it bootable. This is because the distro exists in a compressed state on the storage media and the familiar Linux directory structure is created on the fly during boot. The ISOs of most editions weigh in around 300MB each. Porteus is available as seven separate ISO images, each with a different desktop – from the heavyweight KDE and Cinnamon to the lightweight LXQt, LXDE and Openbox and others. On writable mediums, Porteus will save all changes inside a folder and load them on subsequent boots. Porteus is a portable distro designed and optimized to run from removable media such as a USB flash drive, SD card or even optical media like a CD. You can also flesh out the distro using mintInstall package manager. These are complimented by several traditional desktop apps as well such as the Firefox web browser. In the latest release, Ice now has support for isolated profiles for Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, and Vivaldi SSBs.Ī number of web apps are set up out of the box, including Microsoft Office Online, Google apps and which uses WebGL to provide a glorious 3D chess experience.

The SSB webapps have a minimal browser interface and some of them really look well integrated into the desktop. Peppermint’s USP is the home-brewed tool called ICE, which can turn websites into web apps, technically known as Site Specific Browsers or SSBs, and roll them into the application menu.

It also uses Xfce’s window manager, menu and panel, keeping to the traditional desktop metaphor, while still allowing a few modern conveniences like type-to-search in the menu. This is a fast and lightweight distro that uses the LXDE desktop, although its developers are quite happy to cherry pick elements from other desktops, such as the use of the Nemo file manager from Cinnamon for its handling of network shares. Peppermint is a lightweight Linux distro based mostly from packages in the Ubuntu repositories along with some key components from Linux Mint.

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