Fortysomething Geek

Today I am going to give my readers a review of Pear OS 7. Unlike my last "short preview," I have a been using Pear OS 7 on a live machine for more than a month now. If you want to know what Pear OS is, it is basically a Mac OS X imitator Linux distribution based off Ubuntu. It is designed to look like OSX running Linux.

I'll start off by saying. If you want a OS X experience, this is not it. Yes, the look is there and it has lot of cool things but the looks are not skin deep. It doesn't have the Mac philosophy behind it. Skinning something and adding icons does not make it a Mac experience.

Now, for my review.

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Here is something you don't see too often.

Here, I have Pear OS 7 which is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution running on my Thinkpad. Pear OS is known for being Cupertino inspired. It is pretty much an OSX themed Linux disto. Inside Pear OS, I have Mountain Lion 10.8.2 running inside a VMware Virtual Guest.

I cloned a few of my old Macs on my Macbook using Fusion 5. The clone VM guest was on a USB drive I had and I was wondering if my VM guests would start up in Linux on a different machine. To my surprise, double clicking the .VMX file, the VM guest launch and ran inside Pear OS running VMware player for Linux. It ran with no problem. I thought there would be some sort of check to prevent this but apparently not.

Pear OS is an Ubuntu 12.10 based Linux distro with a Mac-like skin.
They just released version 7 and I took it for a spin. It definitely apes a lot from Cupertino.

From start up, login, launcher, Finder, to even Mission control, this distro is a definitely Apple-inspired. It even has a time machine app called "Back in Time."

Overall, it doesn't work quite like OSX. It is still using GNOME 3 with a skin.
Still, it is an interesting release.

Link: http://pearlinux.fr/


Screen shots for your perusal:







On a 2560x1440 display.






And here is how it looks on a 27" iMac.