Peppermint: Desktop Linux for the cloud generation

I think it's neat that people have been working on projects like this. It's good to play around with things and make your own thing...

That said, I think that if you're doing all the work to create and "market" your own distro (even if it's largely built on Ubuntu), you should have some kind of problem it solves. Mint, another popular Ubuntu-based distro started as a solution to the deprecation of Gnome 2. Not for me, but it solved a problem. I'm just not sure whose problems Peppermint solves.

Most people who only need a glorified web-browser box (grandparents and older parents, for example) are better off with something that hand-holds a bit more, like Chromium OS or ChromeOS, where you get "apps" using an app-store like interface.

On the other hand, people who are more savvy and don't need the hand-holding typically don't get as much utility from web-based solutions. And if they do use some online services for certain things (like word processing), most are comfortable just using something like the Chrome Launcher and using a more mainstream distro. That's the tack that I take, and it works well for me.

To each his or her own, though. If this solves problems for the developer and other people like it and use, then I suppose my critique doesn't hold up. And if someone enjoys doing it, and even a few people use it, the more power to them. I just worry sometimes about the ever-greater fragmentation of the Linux desktop.