Pear OS 8 Beta 1 Review

Pear OS is a distro based on Ubuntu, with a heavily customized version of Gnome Shell, such that it kinda sorta looks like Mac OS X.

I've used Pear OS before, version 6, and I quite liked it. It was good looking, fast, and user friendly. 

My main problem with the "standard" Gnome Shell is that it tries to cram everything into one "hot corner", dock, program selector, workspace selector and program launchers. What Pear OS does, is separate these things so that it's less cluttered and easier to use. There's one hot corner for program selection, another for workspace selection, and the program launchers is accessed from an icon on the dock.

This new version brings quite a lot of changes, both in looks and functionality.

Gone is the standard black panel of Gnome Shell, it's have been replaced by a grey one, making it look a lot more like Mac OS X than before. Now, I quite liked the black, but the grey look pretty good too. Pear OS is still a very pretty distro. 

My favorite new thing is the menu bar integration into the panel, in the same way that it is in Ubuntu. It saves vertical space by utilizing what would otherwise be dead space in the panel. For a lot of people, the slight saving in desktop space probably doesn't matter, but on a small screen laptop, it can make a big difference. In addition, I like the fact that the menu items are always in the same place, regardless of where the window is.

This is a beta, and an early one at that, so of course there are bugs and things missing. The hot corners wouldn't work unless I logged in and out again (and selecting Pear OS 8 session). There aren't any really good wallpapers yet, previous versions have had really nice ones.

I won't go through the default programs that are included, if there's something you don't like, you can always replace it after all. Pear OS does come with a few bespoke applications though, such as for customization, PPA handling, system cleanup, and now also a cloud service.

In summary, Pear OS 8 Beta 1 still has a few bugs, it's clear that it isn't ready, but it looks like it'll be a great distro, one I'll probably be installing as my main OS once it's released.