Pinguy OS 12.04 LTS Has Been Released

Pinguy OS 12.04 LTS (based on Ubuntu 12.04) has been released today and it uses GNOME Shell by default, customized with quite a few extensions that give the latest Pinguy OS the same feel as the previous releases.

For the 11.10 release, Pinguy OS was labelled "beta" because its developer didn't consider it was mature enough. With the new 12.04 release, there's no more beta label and indeed, Pinguy 12.04 feels mature and stable, bringing you a huge list of customizations both for the user interface as well as under the hood (like zRam for instance).

Pinguy OS 12.04 doesn't come with many changes since the previous release, but of course, the default applications / extensions have been updated to their latest versions. For instance, GNOME (and thus GNOME Shell) has been updated to version 3.4.1, just like in Ubuntu 12.04. Other updates include Wine 1.5.6, Skype 4.0, TeamViewer 7, XBMC-PVR 11.0 Eden, Linux Kernel 3.2.0-25 and so on.

Just like the beta, the stable Pinguy OS 12.04 uses Cardapio as the default menu instead of GNOME Shell Activities Overview, but this can be configured using GNOME Tweak Tool which is installed by default (simply disable the Cardapio, "Remove Activities Overview Button" and "No Topleft Hot Corner" extensions).

There's also an alternative menu called Axe, which is disabled by default (you can enable it using GNOME Tweak Tool):

 

Other GNOME Shell extensions included by default in Pinguy OS 12.04 (though not all are enabled by default):

• GNOME Shell Extension Updater
• Weather Indicator
• Classic Systray (moves the tray icons to the top GNOME Shell bar)
• Shellshape (tiling window extension)
• Shell OSD (places shell notifications in the upper right hand corner)
• Native Window Placement
• Workspace Indicator
• GPaste (clipboard manager)
• Panel Settings (you can set the top bar to autohide, etc.)
• User Theme
• System Monitor
• Media Player Indicator

Other than that, Pinguy OS continues to use two Docky instances at the bottom and left, elementary is used for the icon theme and window titlebar theme and Zukitwo for the GTK and GNOME Shell theme.

For the login screen, Pinguy OS 12.04 continues with GDM 3.0.4, which has been themed to match the desktop:

As for the default applications, Pinguy OS 12.04 uses Clementine as the default music player, VLC as the default video player, Webilder for automatically fetching and changing the wallpaper, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Documents, XBMC, Arista Transcoder, Cheese, Handbrake, OpenShot Video Editor, gtkpod, Deluge as the default Bittorrent client, Firefox with lots of customizations, Empathy, Dropbox, Gwibber, Skype, TeamViewer, Thunderbird, XChat, Pinta, Shotwell, Rapid Photo Downloader, LibreOffice, PlayOnLinux, Wine, Docky, CoverGloobus, Gloobus Preview, system utilities such as Y PPA Manager and more.