Every month, the head of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre, writes up a blog post detailing what work has been going on behind the scenes. This month he states that the next iteration of Cinnamon, the main desktop environment for Linux Mint, will feature something called styles which allow you to choose between mixed, dark, or light themes and combine colours that work well together.
The new styles will be located in theme settings and will give you the choice to pick a desktop style such as Adwaita, Mint-X, Mint-Y, and so on. You can also pick a mixed, dark, or light appearance, and then from the advanced settings, you can pick colours and combinations to change the tint used for the close button, icons, and more. Users should see a “new” theme in the style drop-down called Mint-L, which stands for Mint-Legacy; this is just the Mint-Y-Legacy theme which has been renamed.
With the last release of Linux Mint, stripes were attached to folders that reflected the theme colour you picked. These received criticism from the community, though, because they were predominantly yellow and didn’t reflect the theme colour the user picked well enough. In the next version of Cinnamon (and by extension, Linux Mint), the stripes will be replaced by two-tone icons that fully reflect the user’s choice of theme colour.
For all of you out there who like the Yaru theme from Ubuntu which mixes purple, orange, and dark grey, you’ll be glad to hear that Yaru will be a theme option in the next version of Cinnamon. With the Yaru theme, the icons will still be in the same shape as the Papirus icons but they use the colours found in the Yaru theme on Ubuntu.
Linux Mint 21.2 should be available around May or June and will be easy to upgrade to from Linux Mint 21.1. Like other 21.x releases, this version will still be based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, rather than Ubuntu 23.04 which is coming later this month.