This must be about as cheeky as it get - a nice Pear!

Pear OS is a version of Ubuntu ripping off Apple's OSX wholesale. Even the version names (panther, puma etc) borrow from the cat theme.

But the funny thing is that it actually looks *good*.

The bundled apps are all the usual suspects: Opera, brasero, synaptic, shotwell etc though sylpheed email client is new to me, so it's probably going to mostly work just like any other Linux distro. But the interface does look very polished.

I've not moved to Apple's Lion 10.7 yet, and after Snow Leper I hope I don't have to. But this does look intriguing, in the slightly messed up way that OSX/Gnome 3 have adopted.

Get it here.


*update*

Review here.


*Update 2*

Downloaded a copy, burned DVD, now I'm running it here as a live disc. It's surprisingly snappy off the disc - live CDs etc are usually slow, but this feels only a little slower than off a hard drive.

Is it like OSX? No.

There's some nice eye candy in there if you like that sort of thing, but this is definitely a Linux distro. Would I use it? Not normally, except I have a box I want to build & experiment on, so I might just try it on that. Thing is, because of DigiKam I'm pretty much committed to KDE as a desktop now, and Sabayon do most stuff really well. But I could fiddle with other OSs on a spare system. Maybe try to dual-boot this with AV linux & have 2 dock-based OSs on the same machine.


*Update 3*

Is it like OSX? Actually yes, it is, quite a bit.

I've probably spent 20min fiddling, and I'd say that if you've used a Mac before then it may not actually feel all that strange. The Apps store is a nice touch, and made finding software very easy - except some of it is in French! In the review I linked the reviewer commented this was the first distro running Gnome 3 that he's recommend, and I guess I'd go along with that. Certainly worth a look.