The Linux Mint project head, Clem Lefebvre, has shared what the community has been up to over the last month and it"s quite interesting what he has to share. This month, the flagship desktop environment, Cinnamon, has been receiving an overhaul to make it look more up-to-date, the new theme has even landed in the Cinnamon master branch which means people can use it soon.
As a bit of background, Lefebvre said last month that while Linux Mint ships with the Mint-Y default theme, other distributions of Linux that use Cinnamon tend to stick to the default theme which has grown comparatively ugly over time.
Lefebvre said the ideal situation is for each distro to use its own Cinnamon theme to spruce things up a bit but as that is not happening in some cases, Cinnamon 6.4 will include a "much-improved default theme."
The new theme that has been created is described as being much darker and contrasted than before with objects being rounded and a gap being introduced between applets in the panel to make things more spacious. Here"s what the notification area and calendar applet will look like with the new theme:
Another area that got updated is the dialog boxes. They have rounded edges and rounded buttons with the most dangerous button being marked in red to alert the user. Here"s what that looks like:
The creator of the theme also reworked the Force Quit dialog box. It used to be a Gtk window but was rewritten in Clutter to match the rest of Cinnamon, here"s what it looks like now (it"s a bit inconsistent how the red button has now moved to the left side compared to the image above):
The media-buttons on-screen display (OSD) has been updated to look more modern:
Here"s how the Workspace OSD looks:
This new theme is not fully complete yet, the developer working on it is also working on improving the appearance of notifications, animations, the main menu, pkexec/logout dialogs, and a new status applet. As each of these features is completed, it will be shared in the Linux Mint monthly news.
There was also an announcement regarding the backend of Linux Mint, that the transition towards Aptkit and Captain is now finished. Beginning with Linux Mint 22.1, due in December, none of the Mint projects will depend on aptdaemon, synaptic, gdebi, or apturl.
The benefits of this, according to Lefebvre will be that there won"t be any more translation issues, there will be no more bugs or papercuts as it won"t depend on unmaintained components that are upstream, and the new setup has a redefined scope with anything the Mint project didn"t like being removed (or added if needed).
For anyone out there looking at the default Cinnamon theme and thinking they don"t like it, Linux Mint itself will probably not use it by default, instead staying on the Mint-Y theme which has been designed to fit the Mint vision of how a desktop should look. If Linux Mint did switch to it, then it would be a matter of going and choosing the old theme from the settings, it"s quite straightforward in Mint to do that.
Source: Linux Mint