Last month, the Linux Mint project announced that it was working on a new website to modernise the brand. In this month’s news digest, the project showed off a rough prototype of its new website, and even a new, rounder, logo which it thinks will scale down better. It also announced improvements to Cinnamon and the Mint tools.
Following questions about why the previous site looked so dated, the Mint team set to work on a new look for the website. Describing the site, the Clem Lefebvre, head of the project said that the new design has less text but more prominent elements to present the operating system to new users. The sponsors down the side of the site are also going to get an update with monochrome logos which should fit well into the new design.
As for the new, round, logo, Clem said that it will scale down better when it’s needed to act as a favicon or an item on a menu. Its circular proportions will also make it symmetrical, an improvement over the current design which “looks off-center because of its non-symmetrical border”.
As for Cinnamon, Linux Mint’s primary desktop environment, the developers have been hard at work making it more performant. For example, the window manager now has decreased input lag and the application menu applet loads twice as fast as before. These improvements were achieved my simplifying core components such as DocInfo and AppSys following a review of the code.
As for the Mint tools, the following features have landed in the Update Manager already:
- Automated removal of old kernels and no longer needed packages
- Inhibition of system shutdown or reboot during automated tasks such as automated updates
- Persistent rotated logs
- Configurable auto-refresh
- Specific version update blacklisting
- Update Manager now detects APT lock so it no longer fails when APT is locked.
The Software Manager and Backup Tool also received some caching improvements, Clem wrote:
“The cache used by the Software Manager was moved to mint-common, turned into a Python module and given the ability to recognize manually installed software. This is achieved by analyzing the installer logs coming from Ubiquity. As a consequence, in Linux Mint, the Backup Tool and the Software Manager will be able to share the same cache and to list not only the applications which were installed via the Software Manager, but also the applications which were installed via other means.”
Linux Mint 19.2 should be made available in the summer when the developers deem the release to be ready for public consumption.