Before we start with the news I’d like to thank all the people who send donations to us and who help our project grow. Many thanks to you all.
Linux Mint 20.3 Una
Linux Mint 20.3 was codenamed “Una”. Its stable release is planned to arrive for Christmas this year. It will come in 3 flavors: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.
LMDE 5 Elsie
Work is set to start on the next version of LMDE which was given the codename “Elsie”. It will be based on Debian 11, ship with a Cinnamon desktop environment and support both amd64 and i386 architectures.
New website
The new website is now fully ready and live on https://www.linuxmint.com. It looks minty, it works on all devices and it looks modern. It also does a better job than before at welcoming newcomers, explaining what Linux Mint is, why people love it and how to install it.
It took longer than expected but the job is done and we’re glad we took the time to finally do it. I’d like to thank all the people who sent us feedback and who helped us with it.
The website no longer shows ads and this blog announcement is no longer showing the community sponsors. These were tough decisions to take because they immediately reduce our income but they also make Linux Mint look more serious and professional. We’re hopeful they’ll help us grow in the long term and we’ll generate enough to not worry about it.
We received a lot of positive feedback since the website went live so we know you really like it! I know we can’t please everybody and taste is subjective but for most people this is a very welcome change. Personally I remember how amazing the previous website looked when it was made in 2009, but what looked amazing then just simply looks outdated now. Although I grew attached to it since it represented part of our identity during these many years, getting the opportunity to redesign it during this development cycle was a relief and I’m very happy with the result. We are a modern operating system. We use Linux because it’s better, not because it’s free or because it’s old or because it didn’t embrace controversial design changes. We use it because it’s fast, because it works, because it does what we want. It was important for our website to not only convey these ideas but to look modern as well.
Titlebars
With the website finished, the artwork is given full priority at the moment. This is also an area we often neglect when working on development and focusing on bugs and new features. Although the introduction of Mint-Y made Linux Mint look more modern there still are many visual aspects of the distribution we want to improve.
The titlebars were too small. We want to make them rounder with bigger buttons to make the desktop look more pleasant and generous and to make it easier to press the buttons.
Accents
The current Mint-Y theme is a grey theme with many “accents”.
An “accent” is a part of the theme which uses a vibrant color (Aqua in the example above) to catch your attention and look more noticeable than the rest of the theme
Accents make the theme look nice, catchy, vibrant, fun even… especially on top of grey which can be quite austere.
That said, accents also compete for your attention and distract you from the actual content. Because they’re so prominent in Mint-Y they also prevent us from using colors which could be more vibrant. A vibrant green might look better than the one we currently ship with, but because there are so many accents in the theme, it would feel overwhelming.
To make the theme look more pleasant we’re trying to remove accents and inject a tiny bit of tint into our shades of grey.
Small widgets such as sliders, checkboxes, radios and the close button continue to provide your favorite highlight color while the rest of the theme takes a step back and looks more neutral than before.
In the current theme, selections use inverted colors. This looks nice in text entries but it can be overwhelming in lists which contain embedded widgets. Transmission for instance features a treeview of elements which use progressbars. When some elements are selected the list quickly becomes unreadable, because the highlight color is used all over the place, inverted in many places, and it just looks confusing.
We’ll keep color inversions on small widgets (text entries, maybe the sidebar) but we’ll remove them in large areas. In a long list of items we’ll want selected items to only differ from non-selected ones via a background color, not through inverted colors.
Colors
The greys underneath are tinted just a tiny bit (2% in the screenshot below).
This brings back a bit of fun to the theme and makes it look pleasant.
At the moment we’re still working with the same colors as we used in previous releases. We do however think that tinted greys look better in some variants than others and we know the removal of some of the accents now allow us to explore colder greens and more vibrant colors.
Dark Apps
Last month we talked about supporting Dark mode in Mint-Y. Since then we cleared many compatibility issues with the various window managers we’re using and I’m happy to report we’re going ahead with that. Dark mode is the ability for certain applications to look dark without using a dark theme. In other words it makes it possible for only some applications to be dark and for the rest of the desktop to remain light.
Here’s an example with Mint-Y-Purple:
As you can see above, the theme is light yet some applications (gnome-terminal, Celluloid) are dark. We’ll use this technique in Linux Mint 20.3 to ship with a light theme but to make the following apps look dark by default:
- Hypnotix
- Celluloid
- GNOME Terminal
- Pix
- XViewer
Note: Xfwm doesn’t support dark mode, so Pix and Xviewer will remain light in Xfce to keep full compatibility with that window manager. Hypnotix and Celluloid use GTK borders so they will support dark mode everywhere.
Legacy
We’re hoping you’re excited with these visual changes and that they will be well received. We’re also aware we can’t change that many things without creating frustration for some of you, and that’s not something we like to do.
Last month you asked us to reconsider removing Mint-Y-Darker and we heard you. That already got the ball rolling on a project to keep the old theme available in the repositories.
So first of all, you will be able to make 20.3 look exactly as it did before (and that includes Mint-Y-Darker) by installing a new package called mint-themes-legacy. This will give you access to both the new themes and the old ones.
Second, dark mode is configurable in every single application we ship dark by default. So if you don’t like Hypnotix, Celluloid, Pix, Xviewer or GNOME Terminal to be dark, you’ll be able to disable that in each one of them.
Sponsorships:
Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:
Gold Sponsors:  Silver Sponsors:    |
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Donations in August:
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Nice update! Thanks again for all your hard work.
With themes in mind, what are your thoughts on the GTK4 theming situation? Seems that they are removing lots of options for custom themes in GTK4 in favor of libadwaita.
We have a wait-and-see approach. There’s a lot of good things coming from upstream but we also know what we want. We’ll be strict on what’s important but pragmatic all the same.
The page does not allow to respond to Clem’s reply, but it does allow to respond to your original question (so I will do that).
I worry about adopting the wait-and-see approach. The people at PopOS are preparing _now_, because they think that the upstream new version of GTK is set to break all of their themes (!).
Please provide a link towards PopOS’s reactions. I’m interested in this.
Joseph is working on adding GTK4 support in Mint-Y.
Personally I won’t let any app in our default selection break our theme in Mint 21. I would replace it, or patch it, or fork it, or patch libadwaita, or even patch GTK if it came to that. I don’t think it will come to that but that’s what I mean by being strict and knowing what we want.
The migration to GTK3 was brutal upstream. With the exception of Mint 12 I think we managed to patch regressions, delay changes and adopt design changes which were good but which broke with the past at a nice pace. We were able to embrace flat themes, symbolic icons, CSD, dark mode, touch UI widgets (toggle buttons for instance) and many improvements after people got used to them and they no longer frustrated most people. We also rejected many upstream changes and stayed true to our own vision of the desktop. Cinnamon is testament to that, we didn’t want to lose our panel, our applets, our tray, our window-centric switcher or our desktop paradigm. Looking ahead at GTK4, we’ll have the same approach, we’ll keep a close eye on the changes, consider what they bring and what they take away, if they’re of interest or not, and whether people are ready to move on or not. Developers who jump into GTK4 without thinking or caring what it means for their non-GNOME users, or developers in general who only care about their app integrating properly in a desktop we don’t ship, aren’t likely to produce apps we’ll continue to use, or at least that we’ll continue to use without modifications.
I heard people talk about changing toolkits, I agree with their concerns but I think it’s too early for that. If you’re developing an app with GTK right now and you want it to continue to work well for all users of Linux the solution is simple, stick with what works, what integrates well, what’s stable and what is supported everywhere. Yesterday that was GTK+, today that’s GTK3.
How about rounded corners at the bottom of the windows as well. It will make it look more uniform.
Thank you for the amazing work.
I think there is a bit of overreaction going on here. At least for Mint. To be clear, Gtk4 changes nothing as far as theming goes. Do themes need to be updated for it? Yes, but that is expected. The major issue here revolves around libadwaita. A library separate from gtk. We really don’t need to worry about this until, or if, the small handful of gnome apps we use in Mint choose to switch to it. Some other distros have bigger concerns because they rely much more heavily on those gnome core applications. Also, keep in mind that libadwaita hasn’t even had a stable release yet. So it could be awhile before this even becomes a real issue.
Because of libadwaita and GTK4, the Budgie desktop will not be based in GTK anymore. They’re working on another toolkit, the same from Enlightenment, the E.
Thanks for your work!
I hope system tray gets some love! (especially third party apps icons: force black & white mode, standarize sizes, avoid blurry icons…)
That really depends on the app and there isn’t much we can do at DE level. If the app comes from our repositories, especially if we ship it by default, we can patch it to look nice everywhere. If it’s 3rd party, and even worse if it’s proprietary then all you can do is contact the editor and hope they will care to fix the issue.
I don’t use Mint-Y, but thanks for not cutting window content and only rounding top corners. Nice changes indeed.
And sorry for insisting with the logo. No problem if you don’t wnt to change it.
Hi Clem
I really appreciate your work. I sometimes do some distro hopping, but always come back to Linux Mint for my day-to-day work. Thanks a lot for that. In your previous response you write “We know what we want”. Can you shed some light on where Linux Mint is heading in the next year, I’m just curious.
Sincerely, John
Hi John,
In terms of integration we want apps to follow the theme and look native. It’s ok for 3rd party apps to look different but not for the ones we ship with by default. That’s what I mean by saying that in relation to artwork. In terms of features I prefer to wait until they are implemented before talking about them, for 2 reasons. First because we never know for sure if they’ll land in a given release, sometimes they can be postponed, sometimes it’s the opposite they land earlier than planned. Second, because decisions are often taken or changed during the development cycle, while the features are implemented and tested, so things can change a lot during that time. A good idea can prove bad and be canceled, or it can stick but lead to something much bigger as we start working on it.
We do have roadmaps which are publicly available though. Here is the one for 20.3: https://trello.com/b/ic24nOX4/linux-mint-203.
Awesome, I didn’t know that site.
regards, John
The new themes with round corners and with the dark background on the left removed looks awful, make an option to revert it back to the one that is currently avaiable.
Such modification might stop me using your desktop and distro… don’t go for Firefox’s way.
Maybe you should’ve read the whole article before asking this question.
You can just use the older theme, no need to be this radical.
In my opinion the correct sentence would be “We use it because it’s fast, because it works, because it does what we want AND BECAUSE IT’S OPEN SOURCE”. I think being open source is not a secondary aspect when talking about software (and software freedom).
Anyway very good work! 😀
It’s secondary for Mint, if you want it as a primarly standpoint, you can use LMDE or better, Debian, Fedora…
Lovely work and I use and encourage others to Use LM just because of those ideals. Thanks and keep it going and growing. Much love
Finally, I will be able to hit the close button on the first try! Thank you, cheers 🎉️
Darn! Am I the only one who notices the lack of proper text
scaling in some apps? Like in jd2, chromium, rssguard, etc. parts are minisculously tiny shown. Even QT5 adjustment doesn’t help. That problem does not exist on old 1366×768 screens.
PS Your site does indeed much nicer, modern etc. Congrats!
I’d like to make a donation but my country (Taiwan) is not supported. Are there any plans to add additional countries?
Thanks Adam, Paypal doesn’t accept donations from all countries unfortunately. Please consider using Patreon or crypto currencies instead. If this is not possible we recommend donating to upstream projects or local open-source initiatives.
U’re not alone. I am also a user from Taiwan. 🙂
I donate Linux Mint by using Patreon, Taiwan credit card is available in Patreon.
The new theme still has a serious problem design. Why the Close button has an accent color? GNOME 40 uses #dedbd7 and #efefee both are tones of grey.
Why is the close button accent an issue? There’s only one on the screen and it’s quite small.
Using the Mint-X theme for the window borders solves that issue.
I completely feel the opposite, I really hate that they’re removing accents. I don’t know where this obsessive belief comes from that we must have bland grey monochrome system-trays, title-bars, selection highlights and so on. A splash of colour here and there helps me identify things quickly. After years and years of using Cinnamon I still have to hover over the sound or wifi system-tray icons and wait for the pop-up text label when I want one of them because they both just look like propagating waves. I remember in Windows for example sound was yellow and wifi was green which very quickly became muscle memory and instantly identifiable.
Colour in the windowing area does NOT detract form the content I’m working on. I KNOW where the content is – it’s in the CONTENT part of the application. Personally I feel Cinnamon’s theming has always been it’s weak point and removing accents goes in the wrong direction for me.
I totally agree with Glenn here. I hate that the trend is to go back to monochrome monitor look and feel.
I second all he said. Colorful title bars help me identify the active window, a colored close button helps me hitting it, and colorful tray icons make me find them instantly.
Things do not have to be multi rainbow colored, but some color accents do not harm. There are clean, sharp, colored icons too. Just a matter of design.
I have to agree withe that. The rounded corners on the top of the window in the new version are quite pretty, but i think the others changes make the new windows lack of color. What i liked in the current version is that windows were perfectly balanced between color and black/white/grey. But it’s only my opinion.
Thanks for listening to those of us who didn’t want to see Mint-Y Darker removed.
YES! I strongly endorse your comment Terry Phillips, and add my thanks to Clem for offering a solution to users who really like the Mint-Y Darker variants!
Exactly! These moves are the reason I love Linux Mint!
One more, thanks Clem and all developers and one more love for Linux Mint.
The new website looks great !!
I would like to suggest some features that I think are missing from Mint and may be very useful [for future releases]: The option that Xreader can open files in tabs / Celluloid [right click] option to add files to playlist / Xviewer’s ability to view webp files.
Thanks for the great work!!!
P.S. I hope that for this new release you can update the Flatpak repository to a more recent version.
Yes, I would like these features too!
Flatpak version 1.12 has just been released
Pleased to see LMDE5 hasn’t been forgotten. Hope to see a release soon!
Yes, this news has made me happy too; I hope to be out before Christmas but frankly I’m pessimistic about it:I think they will first privilege 20.3 then after lmde5 but if it comes out before Christmas it will be a good gift then it will mean that it is trying more and more to get closer to the debian ryhtme!
Yes, that’s great news! I’m using LM as main system on all of my three machines. It works well. But as Canonical made more and more controversial decisions which I don’t appreciate I’m thinking about transition to LMDE.
Planning to install it on the oldest one as soon as LMDE5 released. I already tested LMDE4 in virtual machines but don’t want to install it on bare metal until LMDE5 released because LMDE5 might require a complete reinstall of the system.
I’m waiting for LMDE5 instead of just installing Debian 11 with Cinnamon because LMDE looks much more polished and also it more close to Mint project. So LMDE5 is very welcome.
Yes, I’m waiting this release to use again LMDE. But, it could be nice if they implement option to choose WM during installation, like Debian.
This makes me extremely happy too! I’m even more happy that LMDE5 will still support 32-bit x86, which gives a few more years’ life out of the little Atom-powered netbook I take whenever I travel anywhere.
I love LMDE4, but some packages are now a little old, for instance the upstream Debian Buster’s version of KDEConnect doesn’t seem to have the SMS-messaging GUI, and Buster’s dislocker crashes when opening bitlocker volumes formatted after a certain release of W10. With these little improvements from Bullseye, LMDE5 will be the absolute perfect operating-system for me!
I’d strongly urge anyone interested in Linux Mint to also try LMDE, as to me it’s like Mint but even more stuff “just works” and it’s even faster, more stable and reliable. I primarily use LMDE, with regular Mint on a machine where I need newer versions of a few packages.
As a nice little side-note, both also seem to be relatively easy to liberate without breaking (with the help of tools like vrms) to remove any proprietary non-free stuff that’s in the installation image. I’m not completely rigid and strict, but if there’s a free (libre) tool to do something I will favour it over something that’s merely “open-source” but not completely free… but I only use anything proprietary as a desperate last resort.
Looking forward to LMDE5. It’s probably too soon for them to say when it will be out but the fact that they have started is great news for us LMDE users.
If I wasn’t so attached to Xfce, I’d probably make the switch to LMDE5 when it came out. I already run Debian 11 on my media server. Love Mint Xfce too much to ditch Mint to make the switch to Debian for my desktop and laptop and I also don’t hate the Ubuntu base enough though there is more I dislike about it with each new version. Anyway, I hope that if there ever comes a day that LM has to ditch the Ubuntu base, they’ll consider adding the Xfce desktop to LMDE. In the meantime, I fully support the decision to only do the one desktop even though I wish it were not the case.
We have been using LMDE3 as a production OS in our environment alongside LM 19.x. Now, as it looks like LMDE5 is nearing its release, we are looking forward towards skipping LMDE4 and deploying LMDE5 directly to replace LMDE3. With many controversial decisions of Cannonical, LMDE seems to be the natural future path of “Linux Mint”. Hats off to Clem and its team for such a wonderful job. I hope that BTRFS support in LMDE5 is enterprise-ready due to problems with BTRFS support issues.
Exciting update! Liking the preview of the new accents. Looking forward to a cooler green! My only qualm is the larger titlebars – I have Mint on a teeny netbook 1024×600 and prefer to save some screen real estate. Will I have to download mint-themes-legacy just to keep the smaller titlebars? And dark *themes* (e.g. Mint-Y-Dark) will continue to be supported, right?
Hi Samuel,
The dark themes continue to be supported. The old titlebars will be available in mint-themes-legacy, that said the new ones are only 7px higher (6px taller than before + 1px border which wasn’t there before). We can probably reduce them a little bit as well.
I use relatively large 32 ” monitors but also prefer to save screen space. There is a great extension “Cinnamon Maximus” which makes possible to hide window title when the window is maximized or just by pressing a hotkey (Super + U , Win + U by default).
When title bar disappears you can move or resize window by pressing Super or Alt key and using left / right mouse button (key is set in Settings – Windows – Behavior – Special key to move and resize window).
Try this extension, it’s very stable and you’d like it.
There is also Mint-X title bar theme which makes it possible to set very small title bars just by reducing font size for window titles in Font settings.
Hopefully it will still always work on the asus eee pc 701 @800×600 svga @D ?
Thank you for the best Linux Distro – it is streets ahead of it’s nearest neighbour.
Small point on my wish list:- I can show or hide “application comments” in my main “MATE” menu, but not in my favourites – is there any hope of this being implemented in the future??
Yes, that should be easy to do. I’ll add it to the roadmap.
Exciting news this month. Also, congratulations on the new website, it looks great.
What happens to the dark sidebar in Nemo? Will it be removed and replaced with a light one? I would love to have a choice there as well.
There are still two open bugs that will hopefully be fixed in the next releases:
This one in LM 20.2 and LMDE 4: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/10237
And this one in LMDE 4: https://github.com/linuxmint/mint20.1-beta/issues/28
Hi Jakob,
We’ve a few bug fixes ready to be backported and some awaiting a tag on github.
In the file manager the sidebars will be replaced with light ones, but remain dark in the legacy themes.
Hello Clem, Please make the default tabs visible in Explorer, and change the Firefox icon to the original, Tell me what You think?…
Thanks for the change Design, it’s so important, thank you very much for the development!
Hi Linux Mint team,
The new website is amazing, very beautiful and easy to use!
I really liked the news about the new themes, the images were very good!
I wanted to make a suggestion so that I could hide the menu bar from Xed and Xreader applications, like in Nemo is case. And put an “add annotations” icon on the Xreader toolbar.
Many thanks to everyone on the team for the great work they do on this amazing project!
We need a Cinnamon theming tool. I’m tired of the childish primary LSD tripping colors.
MATE has already a simple tool that allows us to pick an exact color and save my theme so I can work nicely during the day and at night without my eyes soaring.
Also, Nemo needs a lot of love regarding keyboard shortcuts and navigation smoothness.
Example: I create a new folder, name it and I want to enter on it to work inside. Once I Enter its name that folder loses the focus. I need to grab my mouse, drag it in place and double click on it. If the focus was set on the new folder all I had to do was press Enter.
I can’t reproduce that issue in Nemo. Newly created folders are focused here.
I don’t have that issue either. Focus stays on the folder I just renamed.
I am very glad to see that LMDE5 will still be available for i386 🙂
Thank you for the news, the content of which is welcome.
Might I ask here: when will Mint merge the ‘presentation software fix’ (as we might call it), i.e. the fix that allows LibreOffice Impress, and the program ‘pdfpc’, to work properly? There are patched versions of packages that contain the fix, but to use them I have had to tell apt to ‘hold’ those packages for a month or two now (and indeed I have to modify my home-grown terminal updating script to cope well with the held packages)?
Can you give us a link to the upstream bug report/resolution on this? I’m not aware of this issue.
The new designed website has IMHO hit the mark for appealing to those new to Linux. I really do like it. The only problem I see is that I had to dig for this blog release. I know that one is released very soon after each month ends, maybe a day later, or more. Those new to this site may not explore everything right away. Also, if you needed to push out immediately important information, such as “NEWS” of something major. In the distant past when there was a problem with bogus ISOs being delievered during a weekend. Surely, though embarassing, you would want to let all loyal LinuxMint users know about such when they hit the front page. Possibly routinely include the latest blog title somewhere on front page. Would also help me find your monthly update right off as I check every day anyway.
+1 on the news/blog posts… Took some good scrolling to get there (at least on the phone). These things should have a more prominent position.
Apart from that – great “remake”! Pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate.
+1 on a prominent blog or news section on the front page
Agreed. The blog is tucked away pretty deep.
Congratulations for the new website! I like it very much. But I have one little suggestion to have the website looking even better. In the section with Features (What is Linux Mint?), in the right is Productivity and third is Web. These three columns are not aligned with each other in any way and in my opinion that looks a bit unprofessional. Please align them like for example the section with OOTB, KISS, Home rule. That look good!
My screen res is 1366×768, but I think this is not important.
Thank you for Linux Mint Cinnamon!
Clem and Team,
Thank you for keeping the ‘darker’ themes available. You guys rock and it’s so nice to know you really do listen user input.
Hi Clem and Mint Team, thanks for the constant and professional work! Linux Mint Maya Cinnamon was my entry point to a new world I still happily live in.
Please continue your great work!
Q: Is it a Mint issue that e.g. LibreOffice Draw only uses one of my 4 available threads? Most of the time no issue, but with larger files it sucks a little bit.
Thanks Henrik,
I’ve fond memories of Maya, it’s a release I really enjoyed for many reasons 🙂
The packages for LibreOffice are maintained by Ubuntu directly, the issue is very likely to be upstream from us, either in Ubuntu or in LibreOffice directly.
The new website looks great and it’s also paying off with regard to SEO as well. Out of curiosity I used the search term ‘linux operating system’ in Google before they cached the new build, and LM was occasionally drifting out as far as page 4 in the results. Now it’s solidly on page 2, still moving about a bit on that page, but 3rd from top when I did another check just now. Nice one! 🙂
Hi Clem, thanks a lot for keeping the legacy darker themes (I zipped them already to be safe ;-)). I’m also curious about the new changes. What about a symbol icon for onboard? It doesn’t look nice in the stylish tray.
Different story: What bugs me for a long time now is to switch between different users. I switch a lot between a work account and my private one (and sometimes my wife’s one), using suspend mode, go on the next day, restarting the notebook nearly once a week. Sooner or later I cannot log in and have to kill Cinnamon per console to let it restart in one account, nemo starts with a one minute delay in the one account but not the other and so on. The must be something wrong with systemd or nemo-desktop or the session handler – I really don’t know. There are lots of other errors in the logs and in .xsession-errors, but I think that’s kind of “normal”. There is no single hint what’s going wrong after some time (it’s no memory problem). A restart brings back all things to normal. Is there a test scenario for different accounts with suspend over a few days?
Hi,
The legacy theme will be the same as what you have now but under a different name. They’ll be called Mint-Y-Legacy* (for instance Mint-Y-Legacy-Darker-Blue) so that they don’t conflict with the new Mint-Y and you’re able to have both installed at the same time.
Regarding the multi-user issue, try to find a way to reproduce the problem as quickly as possible and as reliably as possible. If it happens “sometimes” and only after a few days it’s very unlikely to get solved, but if we’re able to make it happen always with just a few clicks, first we’ll be in a position where we’ll be able to troubleshoot what’s going on and find the cause more rapidly, but also once we find a fix we’ll be able to make sure that it does indeed fix the issue.
Polish is exactly what Mint needs. I am very happy this is getting attention. My suggestions for other improvements would be:
– celluloid without client-side decorations by default – looks more in line with other mint apps
– change the default “show desktop” for a better one already on the right side after install
– improve “window selection” (ctrl + alt + down) navigation, icons, spacing
Those small things make a big difference. I suggested them in the past in community.linuxmint without much success.
Either way, I love mint, I send you money every year on the anniversary of my first install. I love you. And I pray for your success and endurance. You no-bullshit policies and no politics! Love you guys! Keep it up <3
Thank you,
We try to make CSD and SSD borders look identical so both feel native and well integrated. CSD borders also have the benefit to allow dark apps to work in window managers which don’t support dark mode, Xfwm for instance.
The show-desktop location has always been where it is now. It’s been there in Mint since the very start in 2006. This is where people expect it to be.
Please develop the third idea about window selection, navigation, icons and spacing.
I don’t really like titlebars, in fact I use an extension / spice in cinnamon to have them removed. Anyway, one of the best thing about Lnux is that you can tweak your desktop if you don’t like the default one (to be honest, I don’t use Linux Mnt because I like its default look, but because it works great for me).
What I really like is the new website, it looks much more modern, nice nd easy to use than the old one, great job!!
Hi Clem, I was wondering if the ability to start applications on designated workspaces could possibly be added to a roadmap for Mint in the future. It’s something I find crucial but can’t seem to find a way of implementing it into Cinnamon. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Hi Matthew,
It’s something we thought about in the past and it sometimes comes back into our roadmap. We call it “Activity Manager” and the rationale is to be able to perform common activities quickly by restoring apps/windows in saved locations and sizes but also to be able to reload desired content (a document, a web page..etc). I’ll be honest about this, although we like the idea and we’d love to work on it, it’s not a priority at all for us. The reasons for it to be postponed or even ignored are that it’s hard to do properly (we’d definitely want to load content for instance, not just resize/move windows/apps), it would only work in Cinnamon and we don’t think it would be used by many people.
When we worked on window snapping in Cinnamon and delivered the feature, we basically gave people something they never had anywhere else. It was costly but really exciting. Years later we think nobody uses it. Worse, we think people don’t even know it’s there. Do people know the difference between tiling and snapping in Cinnamon? I’m not sure. Did they know they could turn their 2nd monitor black via Xplayer when playing a movie fullscreen on the 1st monitor? probably not. How many people use Expo and Scale in Cinnamon? or even workspaces? I know they’re popular, but I really think they’re niche features.
Projects such as nemo actions or search management are much more visible and would be used by far more many people. That’s why they usually take priority in a given development cycle and niche projects don’t.
I concur in principle. I (and probably many like me) always like email and browser apps to open up on a specific monitor / screen position – it’s just the way we work. Doesn’t apply to everything necessarily, just the stuff we always have open. Sometimes it seems to remember where stuff was and sometimes it doesn’t – not sure why. Maybe I’ve missed something … but what I almost’ never miss is that LM just works and works and doesn’t give me grief.
Hi Jim,
Some apps memorize their window positions and sizes and reposition/resize themselves.
Hi Clem
Just for the record, I do use windows snapping and it is great!! So there is at least one person!! But I agree many people probably do not know it is there. On another matter, great new website, looks much more professional
Hi Clem, great work as always. I have a few questions:
– Cinnamon does not have any animations for maximizing/unmaximizing/tiling windows by default, these have to be enabled manually. That said, once enabled, the animations are a bit stuttery on all applications and inconsistent between some applications (ex. Firefox compared to Nemo). Are there any plans to fix this?
– Sometime around Gnome 3.6 (or newer) the devs changed how windows are stacked next to each other in the Activities Overview, from simply a grid with applications ordered by last used to a more intuitive, space efficient, paper-spread like approach (it’s hard to describe it with words but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about). Linux Mint has stayed with the old Overview since the fork, are there any plans to backport the newer Overview to Linux Mint?
– Any plans for 10-bit color, Variable Refresh Rate, and Wayland support? There is a way to enable VRR for Gnome under X11 but no way to enable it in Linux Mint without audio and cursor glitches.
– Have you considered changing the default font to something like Noto Sans 9pt, or any font at 9pt? I’ve always found it odd that linux distros in general ship with gigantic font sizes for their UIs, an unnecessary choice in my opinion. Windows and macOS have traditionally shipped with 9pt font sizes, so I feel like Mint would feel more consistent if it also shipped with a 9pt font as default, especially for apps like Chrome which look out-of-place with bigger fonts.
– Would you consider letting apps use their own icons instead of replacing them with Mint-Y ones? I actually like the iOS-esque icons but they don’t cover every single app there is out there so when I pin an app that has no Mint-Y icon then it just looks very out of place. Letting apps draw their own icons would make everything more consistent and would let applications control their brand like they do on Windows and macOS.
– What was the reasoning behind having some icons in the tray area be 16px, but some other ones 24px? This decision is strange, and inconsistent.
– Nemo looks very cool without the menubar, are there any plans to include an option to hide the menu bar for xapps as well?
I have so many more questions but these ones were at the top of my head. Sorry for the wall of text, you don’t have to answer all of them. I have so many ideas and improvements for LM that I might just start contributing directly, what would be the best way to start?
Thank you so much Clem for this wonderful distro, I can’t wait for the next release. Cheers.
https://linuxmint.com/getinvolved.php
Hi Erick,
– We didn’t plan on reviewing animations but it does fall into the scope of giving the desktop more polish so I’ll definitely add this to the roadmap.
– Thanks I wasn’t aware of this. We’ll look into it.
– I really don’t like talking about this because it’s nowhere near ready and I really don’t know if we’ll go forward with it or not. But anyway here goes, we’re currently trying to see if we can run Cinnamon on a recent version of mutter and more importantly, once/if we manage to do it what it means for Cinnamon in terms of performance, in terms of pros but also in terms of cons. We’re not doing it because of Wayland though getting closer to being compatible with it is definitely a pro. Beside that we’re also trying to experiment with having GTK borders on all windows (SSD and CSD) in Cinnamon, the main aim here being to reduce artifacts on rounded corners. We can look into HDR support also and we probably can fix it if someone in the team has hardware to troubleshoot/test it. I’ll ask around and add this to our roadmap as well.
– We used Noto Sans in the past. Feedback from the community urged us to move towards Ubuntu fonts and when we did the reception was very positive. I think this was a good move.
– Apps can use their own icons. In fact it’s down to app developers to decide whether or not they want their icons themed. When you develop an app you can refer to an icon name, which gets picked according to a theme, or an icon path which is invariable. I disagree with you on the fact that it would look better, to me it’s almost a bug if an application doesn’t integrate properly (for instance by not getting properly themed), but from a technical point of view, what you want is already there.
– It’s either a bug or something we can’t solve. I’m assuming you’re talking about the xembed tray here (Gtk.StatusIcon). Some apps refer to icon names and we have some leeway, other hardcode their own icons (sometimes in 16px which doesn’t scale or looks blurry). When we’re dealing with modern technology we can make a difference. When we’re dealing with old xembed and gtk sockets there’s nothing we can do except patch the app itself, assuming it’s open-source.
– Ye.. well. I’ve heard this request from many people. I’ve also heard people say they still run Linux Mint in 600px in 2021. As much as it saddens me I think we can do a few things to make things better. Letting you hide menubars in Xapps is one of them, we’ll add this to the roadmap indeed.
Thanks for the great feedback and ideas.
Hi, thank you for the hard work !
Something that I’m a little worried about, is that the new theme seem very dull and grey to me in your screenshots. I think it’s important to keep a little bit of contrast and color in the desktop, but I’m sure you’ll take care of it !
I also think the icons need a bit more attention, too. While the current theme seems okay to me, I think Linux Mint looks much more classy with the Papirus icon theme – unfortunately, the folder colors doesn’t match.
One last thing, about titlebars: I would like to suggest reducing the padding of client-side headerbars a bit, if that is possible. That would help them feel more in line with classic titlebars, without sacrificing usability.
Too bad to only have ‘cinammon’ for LDME 5, although I love that user interface, my computer doesn’t support it. Anyway I really like ‘Linux Mint’, my gateway to ‘unix’. Thank You!
New title-bars look good, more room to breath and bigger elements are easier on the eyes. But some of us are struggling for screen real estate on our small laptops, where every 10px is quite noticeable. One possibility could be a compact theme variation for such use cases, something like Mint-Y-compact. Firefox also has (had?) such an option for example. Yet more work, I know, but just an idea.
I can understand where you’re coming from about the accents, but from the screenshots it seems the theme in general has lost even more contrast which was already on the low side. The tinted greys idea is fun, but it does also lower the contrast between accents and grey surfaces as well. It could work nicely though if accents and grey tint would/could be set to different colors, as long as the tint remains very subtle.
The current dark background for the left pane in Nemo (and GtkChooser) was nice, I always wished it would be ported to Mint-X’s GtkChooser as well. I understand such things don’t look as marketable as a very low-contrast and monotonous flat design, which gives an object a “seamless” aura. But I’m afraid to say that this approach leads to a lot of sacrifice in the visual functionality, and as a result using the tool isn’t so seamless in practice as its look might ironically advertise. I find that comprehending elements and program’s state at a glance ultimately outweighs how good a theme looks as a static object. Of course marketability and usability don’t have to exclude each other, and I know it’s very hard to struck a good balance in the current climate of flat/mobile design dominance.
Thanks for your feedback,
I have the opposite feeling. I think the dark sidebar and the vibrant accentuation in the current Mint-Y theme make it look better from afar in screenshots but also less comfortable for every day use. It’s a very subjective topic and I really appreciate your input here, not just because you expressed an opinion but because you explained it and that’s really precious when it comes to artwork. I’m not the one driving this in the team, though we all and I also do like where this is going.
Regarding screen real estate now, we’ll definitely look into this and find solutions. I’m aware of the fact that budget laptops ship with small resolutions and also that more expensive options also end up with small resolutions when used in HiDPI.
I also love the black sidebar in nemo for the contrast and readability (and it’s distinctly modern and minty!) . What I’d really like though (if we can’t keep that black sidebar) is to be able to colourise bookmarks/folders/icons in that sidebar like we can for folders in the main nemo window. Colours are practical and quick for the brain to recognize,.
So many positive things! The web site is fresh and clear, with a nice orientation toward prospective users. The upcoming “polish” is elegant — evolution rather than revolution. Allowing us to keep the legacy look, if desired, is very considerate of the developers. Thanks very much.
In my opinion, one of the stellar things about Mint is its stability, especially over time, as updates are applied. It has been many years since I’ve broken Mint during an update, although I use it daily and update as available. Having tried other distros from time to time, I’d say Mint is out in front in this regard. I suppose it takes quite a bit of intent and effort by developers to achieve this stability. So thanks for this also — it is appreciated.
I loved the new themes, they look very good and still familiar. However, I didn’t like the tinted greys, specially the green one (that I think will be the distro default), it looks like a badly calibrated screen.
Instead of a lighter shade of gray in Nemo’s sidebar, why not go with a color that has a bit more snap?
https://i.imgur.com/Xlidbkk.png
Question about the redesign/webpage…
I might be missing something, but shouldn’t there be a link back to the start page after having read the blog?
– Or would that be the back button in my browser?
The Home button brings you there.
In Mint-Y theme, the icon to increase/decrease the size of a window is two arrows in the corners. It’s more understandable than the icon with a square. Will you keep this icon or will you use a square instead ?
Hi,
I didn’t understand your question. You mean the mouse cursor when resizing windows? Can you provide a screenshot?
Screenshot : https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/OuG6CQYP/hHfB2qv6.png
Could you set Geany as default text editor, instead of xed ? Geany is really better.
It’s better for some people. We use Xed because we think it’s more adapted to most people.
I am regretfully saying goodbye to Xed. It does not have a key feature to Restore open tabs between Xed sessions, despite there being a feature request (#226) open on Github since May of 2018. A number of people commented with desire for this option/feature. This can’t be that difficult to implement, and I feel that 3.5 years is long enough to wait. As a former Notepad++ user when I had to run M$ windows, I really miss this feature. I tried a variety of Notepad++ ports or look-a-likes, but the fonts or other shortcomings kept me from adopting them. I looked at Geany as suggested above, and I’m leaving Xed and moving to Geany. This is the 1st time I have felt impelled to make such a move. I still love and appreciate my Mint OS – waiting anxiously for 20.3.
What is most disappointing — and, frankly, baffling — about Xed for me is that it’s missing some very basic features that I would expect even a simple text editor to have.
Such as: Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikethrough.
Even a simple notes application like Xpad has these!
They’re not even available in Xed as a plugin!
The windows with rounded edges are looking very nice, I hope the panel gets some attention and especially the menu, although it works well, I think it could be inspired by menus like the ones in the ARC menu, win 11 and Cinnamenu.
Please don’t change it to a grid!
With the new design and removal of ads, would you guys consider removing Yahoo as the default search engine in Firefox and Chromium?
Nice to see that you quoted Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on the Home page.
When Microsoft announced the ending of support for Windows XP in 2014, I wanted to find another Operating System. I already knew of the existence of Linux, but previous research made me think that it was for experts only, however while searching online in 2014, I happened upon an article by Mr. Vaughan-Nichols, in which he spoke very highly of Mint. In fact, the article was dated 2009, but was still very relevant to me in 2014.
I thought I’d give it a try, and at that time, Mint 17.1 was available so I installed that with the xfce desktop. It wasn’t a million miles away from XP, in the way the desktop was laid out and in its functions ( being able to see the properties of audio files with a right-click, for example).
I have been using Mint ever since, working my way through 17.2 and 17.3. I have also used Mint 18.3 with the Cinnamon desktop, but now I have 19.3 and have reverted to xfce.
I emailed Mr Vaughan-Nichols at the time to thank him, and it’s entirely appropriate that I thank him again via this forum, to give him the credit for steering me toward a much better computing experience, because of his accurate and informative review. Also, of course, Thanks to everyone on the Mint team for such a great Operating System.
Cheers Tony, same, windows xp to linux unbutu 17.1 then to linux mint 19.
Still got a windows xp service pack 2 desk top, and xp service pack 3 note book,
both 32bit, both fast as lightning with no issues, don’t use then on the internet
but are exellent for music, sound design multitrack mixing and video games.
l need the windows sevice pack 2 desk top to help me build linux mint to usb to
install on other computers using portable apps. (https://portableapps.com/apps –
YUMI) Cheers NUM NUTT (windows xp still use and very good and helpfull)
One feature I have been missing a LOT in cinnamon is google calendar integration in the calendar applet like Event Calendar in KDE, would be really cool if u guys add that 🙂
Agreed! I desperately want a caledar panel applet that shows my scheduled events, and maybe allows me to add/edit them. I’ve been wanting something like this for a *long* time. I’d love to see something like what Gnome 2’s calendar applet had when paired with Evolution, but without the Evolution dependency. Or something like KDE or one of Gnome Shell’s calendar applets have. Maybe somehow connect it with the Online Accounts calendar support. It’s something that’s been sorely missed since the introduction of Cinnamon.
I again use Linux and Mint in particular, because it does NOT hook into and leak info to Google, Facebook, etc. YMMV, but to me the whole point of using OSS it to avoid Big Data’s reach. Any such integration must always be optional, and only turned on by the end user on purpose, never by default.
That would be a great idea, I was looking for an applet that would do that, but didnt find any.
I can’t wait to install Linux Mint 20.3 when it comes out as I really like the new Titlebars look.
Linux Mint 20.2 was an awesome realise and I already know that Linux Mint 20.3 will be just as awesome.
Thanks, Jonathan Steadman.
I don’t use Mint-Y, but thanks for not cutting window content and only rounding top corners. Nice changes indeed.
And sorry for insisting with the logo. No problem if you don’t wnt to change it.
The new Mint-Y looks great. One thing I’ve been really wanting for a long time is a color scheme that resembles Windows; blue accent colors, but a red close button. Mint-Y-Dark-Blue gets me most of the way there, but the blue close button continues to bug me. If you guys added an option to force the close button to be red I would love you forever.
Have a look in /usr/share/theme/Mint-Y/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml
You’ll see a section for the close button within the CONSTANTS section, where the value is a GTK custom variable with an HEX value to use as fallback. Replace all that with a red HEX and your close button will always be red.
Make a copy of the metacity-1 folder under ~/.themes/yourthemename/metacity-1 so that you make your own theme variant and it doesn’t get overwritten by updates.
We can’t please everybody but it is modifiable.
I recently started using the Mint-Y-Dark theme in Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon. I like the warm grey tone, it’s visually pleasant, and easier on my eyes.
However, the dark theme makes events I’ve created in the Cinnamon Calendar applet unreadable! The text field of every event is covered with a white tone that’s almost completely opaque.
The only way I can read the text of an individual event is to hover my mouse pointer over it, or click on it. I can’t see all of the events for the month at once.
I haven’t seen an option to disable the Mint-Y-Dark theme for the Calendar applet. Will this option be available with the Mint 20.3 Cinnamon release?
Hi Tom,
No you can’t. However that’s a bug on our side, either in the applet itself or in the theme. Please create an issue on github with screenshots so we can address it.
How are you able to create events in the Cinnamon Calendar applet?!?! As far as I can see, it’s impossible. PLEASE tell me! It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time, but see no way of doing it.
Hello Mike F,
If you have Calendar open, and you’re using either the Month view or the Week view, you can just click on any day and a “New Event…” pop-up appears.
At the top of the “New Event…” pop-up window there’s a text field where you can type a description of the event you want to add. (You can also insert special characters there from Character Map.)
After typing a description of your New Event — if it’s a single event that doesn’t repeat — you can just click the “Add” button at the lower right of the pop-up.
If it’s an event that repeats, you can click on the “Edit Details…” button at the lower left of the pop-up. A larger pop-up appears, with more options, including a button you can click to choose how often you want the event to repeat.
There’s also another, larger, text field for Notes at the bottom of the window. You can type some additional information about your New Event there if you want to.
When you’re finished, just click the “Done” button at the top right of the window.
If you have Calendar open and you’re using the Year view, there’s a sidebar to the right with an “Add Event…” button at the bottom.
Hello Mike F,
When I posted about having an issue with seeing events in Calendar, I was actually talking about the Calendar *application* that’s in the Cinnamon menu.
It was an error on my part to refer to it as an applet! So sorry for the confusion!
I just realized that when you asked about how to create events in Calendar you meant the Calendar that pops up when you click on the date in the Cinnamon tray!
I haven’t seen an option to add events in that Calendar.
Tom, thanks for the clarification! Yeah, I was meaning the panel applet, not the application. I’ve been wanting this feature in Cinnamon from day one, and I and others have been asking for it for a long time. It’s one of the reasons I stuck with MATE for so long before finally switching to Cinnamon. It’d be so wonderful to be able to do in Cinnamon what every other desktop/OS can do with the Calendar applet. I don’t want to switch from Cinnamon, because it has other features that I love, but this is one of those things that’s been a nagging frustration for so incredibly long. I just want the ability to, for example, be reading my e-mail and come across an important event date that someone sends, and be able to quickly drop the calendar down from the panel, add the date, then go back to reading, all without having to pull open a full-blown application that covers what I’m working on. Or, if I get an IM from someone asking if I’m available on a date, I can just drop it down, look at the date and give them an answer, again without a full-blown and unwieldy calendar application to mess with. It’s definitely one of the few irritating, sorely missing items in Cinnamon. It’s hard to believe after almost a decade of Cinnamon development that it hasn’t been addressed.
Some of us use long documents a lot. Like PDF. In the scrollbar, it is a little dot that is hard to spot, when I would like to know if I am reading close to beginning of the document or wherever. Maybe this dot could be set so that at some point would not get smaller? With really long documents seems to disappear completely.
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/overlayscrolling-600×330.jpg
Thanks for great work.
Hi Andrej,
Afaik, that’s upstream from us. It’s a toolkit specificity. I could be wrong though, maybe we’re able to use a GTK setting in the app if it allows it. Where did you get the screenshot from? Are you able to get the scrollbar to act the way you want in Ubuntu or/and in Evince?
Thank you very much for all these continuous stream of improvements that keep coming our way. I am appreciative and grateful everyday to the LM team as I use LM everyday to get my daily work done.
New theme looks great!
But are there any plans on making rounded window corners at the bottom as well? Would be sweet.
I’ll need to ask Joseph within the team, or he might reply to you here directly. He mentioned there were technical issues associated with doing that.
it would be gorgeous round corners top and bottom ps. also nice to have the old magic lamp effects and wobbly windows since the one of today that is in the extensions is an abandoned project.
No, there are no plans for that. Our theming doesn’t even support it. You are only seeing this on some gtk windows because they are moving to a library called libhandy. It specifically allows this sort of theming. That just leaves you with a mix of rounded and unrounded bottom corners, that to me, make it even worse.
Rounding the bottom corners would also cause issues in some apps. Look at Nemo, for example. It has buttons in the bottom corner that would start being cut off by rounding the bottom corners. And it isn’t the only app designed this way.
@JosephM – Regarding the bottom button issue you refer to as a problem with rounded bottom corners… Wouldn’t simply adding extra padding, approximately half the width of the rounded diameter, to the bottom edge of the window frame allow for the space needed to avoid the buttons? That’s what I’ve done to keep rounded menu corners from cutting into the menu text.
@Mike F Sure but then you would end up with this fat border at the bottom that would not look great. Outside of that, rounded bottom corners aren’t supported without using the library I mentioned above. So it isn’t really possible in any case.
uma is as good as ever. I am sure una is more so. the default settings are suitable for me and i never tend to change them. I am looking forward to the changing web site and wondering as to what could be the changes. perhaps the list of sponsors and donors is the only oddity. but the commentary should continue…
If you make title bars rounder, the screenshots will be awful if the bug with screenshots is still not solved.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-screenshot/-/issues/167
Agreed, this is an issue. It does affect the current theme also, though it’s less visible.
About the new website. It sure looks nice.
However it uses external resources : fontawesome and gstatic (you can see it using the NoScript add-on). It’s a pity to use Google ! – and allowing them to track your visitors ! Can you please find another solution ?
If you need external fonts why not use fontlibrary.org where all fonts are Open Source. (Btw : your site will load faster if you host your fonts on your own server.)
Thanks, I didn’t think of that aspect. We can certainly host some of the resources ourselves.
Nicely said! We should fight for our privacy!
You could use https://forkaweso.me/Fork-Awesome/
Hello. I just love using Linux Mint Live Usb. I still boot LM 19.3 when using a second monitor connected to my laptop, other wise I boot LM v20. Are you folks going to resolve this huuuge limitation for Christmas? Is there a way to boot LM live usb in a different language. It would be perfect to set language and keyboard before booting. Regards from Portugal.
Please create a Liberapay account as well, it’s FOSS and I know many people would like to see you promoting FOSS services instead of proprietary ones such as Patreon. It doesn’t cost you anything.
Great work, looking forward to LM 20.3. Please work on the main Menu, make more Windows 7 like.
Also, looking forward for LMDE to becoming systemd-free!
Please don’t alter apps’ pictograms, let the Firefox pictogram be a Firefox pictogram and not some orange wakamoka. Thank you 🙂
Clem wrote:
Linux Mint 20.3 Una
Linux Mint 20.3 was codenamed “Una”. Its stable release is planned to arrive for Christmas this year.
I like the name “Una”, it means:
Unique or singular. That which cannot be subject to division, separation; undivided, indivisible. Whose parts cannot be separated, remaining in their totality, division being responsible for the loss of its essence.
Remembering that you have not yet authorized me to talk about the “shadows”. You must have forgotten.
It would be a niche idea, but Linux Mint “Una” with the “shadows” would be really unique, singular.
LMDE4 is an extremly good OS: it runs on my luks encrypted Dell laptop at work. It also works on an old laptop at home. Thanks a lot for de decision to continue working on this project which to my mind, should become the main MINT distribution : fast, reliable, easy to install and use, stable, no bugs ! Sorry but I can’t find any drawbacks, Mint team reached the perfection with LMDE4.I hope LMDE5 will be at least as good, I have absolutely no doubt on it.
Clem – in reply to your post (the one about GTK4) and asking for a link, here it is (though I could not get the page to load on my normal instance of Firefox, for some reason).
https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/
I found your response to my post somewhat reassuring, in that it seems Mint is well equipped to do whatever proves needful.
Again for Clem, and again as requested: thanks, here is the link to the Cinnamon Issue about presentation software:
https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/10262
LMDE with the Cinnamon desktop does not have an easy way to enable Flatpak settings to be amended. One specific example is the auto-backup feature in Deja-Dup that cannot be enabled from the desktop. See this discussion: https://github.com/flathub/org.gnome.DejaDup/issues/2
Are there any plans to build such functionality into the general ‘settings’ or for a stand-alone ‘flatpak-settings’ GUI?
try Flatseal [search it on flathub]
Good day dev team. I wanted to list a few features that would be a huge welcome:
1) a minimize to tray option for open apps/windows.
2) when windows are maximized and the mouse is to the very most top-right; extend the function of the close button to be clickable to close (same with the unmaximize and minimize to taskbar areas; allow them to be clickable when cursor vertical is at 0). This would simulate the window behavior that many Windows users coming over to Mint would be accustomed to. This is also a nice UX enhancement in general.
3) If you dig into the sound settings in MS Windows, there is a very awesome “Loudness Equalizer” option that is great for watching media. Many videos have loudness spikes and/or weak/soft audio, that function in windows actually does a really good job bringing everything up to an equal level. Is there any way to port this function into Linux Mint?
I think these few additions would go a long way to winning over many more users, especially from MS. What do ya think? Possible?
Regarding #3, that’s not a Mint issue, that’s more of an audio-backend issue, such as PulseAudio or Pipewire (replacing PulseAudio which is pretty much a mess). Big fan of Windows’ Loudness Equalizer, seems to do things just right for me. For now, check out PulseEffects. … Mint still uses PulseAudio, so you will need to use a slightly older version of PulseEffects (they moved away from PulseAudio, like most people are).
I’ve read all the horror stories of trying to install Linux Mint 20. I am still holding off. I would like to see a one click application that simply installs Linux Mint 20 over 19.3. Maybe this is the application they are talking about at Christmas time? Does anyone know?
First, nearly all the “Automatic” procedures I have encountered do at least one thing I don’t like. That said, when 20.3 is released, I expect to do a fresh install, manually. In my case, when installing 19.3 I partitioned the disk manually as follows: /boot=1G, swap=12G, /=40g, /home=300g, /vms=200g, /tmshft=remainder. So this time, when installing 20.3, I will reformat /boot, /, and leave /home onward untouched. Of course, I’ll take a Clonezilla image of the whole hard drive before I start, as insurance. But the manual partitioning I do allows /home and other areas to remain isolated and untouched. I set up /tmshft to have an area where the Timeshift tool can put snapshots of the OS areas. /vms is to store some virtual machines I use for testing. I hope this helps someone.
Not a fan of all the round corners of windows/forms, I like Mint’s themes because of them. Barely a distinction between Mint and KDE if you round the corners… I’ve also found the titlebars to be the perfect height as they are…hopefully these changes are optional.
Dark Apps don’t make any sense to me, but as long as it is optional… I think everything should follow the system theming by nature, out-of-box.
How is hiDPI, Wayland, and Pipewire coming along? Fractional Scaling… *now* need glasses. x_X;
Plus one vote on Liberapay? 🙂
Yes, Liberapay please!
Yes, +1 on having an option (and long term support) for keeping the current titlebar height – or adjustable height. I hate how windows started a trend to grow everything on the screen, and I love that with Mint-Y it’s fairly small compared to the main part of the window. The part that actually contain the content that I’m interested in.
First off – thanks so much for all you do – this is easily the best Distro out there for my daily computing.In many ways, it’s what Windows could have been if M$ didn’t keep changing the user experience over and over while the internals and functionality went to hell over time.
But, that being said, I’m not sure I get all the focus in the subtleties of windowing over the last few versions. It seems like each change has as many advocates as objectors, which makes me question the value a bit. Maybe I just need to experiment some to get it.
Lastly, I picture a fair amount of confusion between the versions “Uma” and “Una”- anyone else?
Just re-read my first paragraph – In NO WAY did I intend to say that the internals or functionality of Mint have degraded. That is CERTAINLY not the case. But it was with Windows.
My question for Clem is will the kernel version planned for 20.3 support the Realtek 2.5G ethernet chip out of the box. I tend to plan my hardware upgrades around dot 3 releases and and several of the motherboards I’m looking at use the Realtek 2.5G chips. Also, I presume the AMD Ryzen 500 Zen 3 chips will be supported seamlessly along with the latest Nvidia drivers. I’m running 19.3 now and had to manually install the Realtek driver (and not the 2.5G one) as well as issues with the Nvidia drivers not correctly setting the path to the driver modules.
Hi Clem, 20.3 looks amazing, I’m looking forward to see the other improvements on visuals you mentioned. Thanks for that.
I know Mint doesn’t do official schedules, but I assume LMDE 5 is a major project, so is this likely to be a “next year” thing, rather than “soon”? I’m certainly looking forward to it, as we’re already using Debian 11 on servers, and Debian 11 with a lovely Minty layer on top will be an excellent desktop platform, I’m sure!
The monthly news items are at the bottom of the front page. It sure takes a lot of scrolling to get there. I think it would be nice if there were some kind of link to jump down there. The menu at top of front page has a “Links”
submenu; possibly, that would be a good place to add such a link. At the beginning of the month I am always looking for the monthly news, which sometimes is a day or two late (or early?). Something like going to an off the wall link like https://www.linuxmint.com/start/ulyssa/ page (have no ide how I go there).
Hi Stan,
Until recently, the Linux Mint Start Page showed the latest posts from the Linux Mint Blog, including the Monthly News.
Since it was the default Home Page for the Linux Mint version of Firefox, it was a quick and easy way to see if anything new had been posted every time I opened the browser.
But now the Linux Mint Start Page just shows a large Google search field with lots of Google links, and only a couple Linux Mint links: User Guide and Release Notes.
So in Firefox Settings I changed the Home Page to the Linux Mint Blog: https://blog.linuxmint.com
Yeah. Me too, I think that once we’ve seen the home page once, we don’t need it anymore. When I come back to linuxmint.com, I just want to see what’s new. A link should be in the menu to access the news directly.
Attn: Moderator
I posted a reply to Stan, regarding the Monthly News, last week. It was late Friday evening, my local time, October 8, US MDT (UTC -6).
My comment is still not showing in the blog. Surely it’s not still “awaiting moderation”.
If there was a problem, please respond with an explanation. Thank you.
Please, change the Firefox icon to the original
I also don’t understand this choice to change the icon of third-party apps. Makes the system look amateur.
please talk more about the email client manager thunderbird 78.15 forced update to version 92.0.1 controversy. Because only the english version is secure update from lauchpad repositories.
I hope more and more people give Linux Mint a try. It’s beautiful and smooth. From my humble perspective, compatibility is key. Please, ship future Mints with anbox or something similar ready to use out of the box. Some smartphone/tablets apps are not a choice but a must have tools, because they come from institutions and businesses which only have that way for people accessing their services. That would change sooooo many things. Appreciated
The MINT team, please switch to a FOSS Github alternative.
Gitlab ?
All good stuff – congrats to the people involved in Linux Mint and it’s continuing improvement!
Awesome!
Thanks for the great work. I really like Mint and I’m using it for years.
Recently I downloaded Fedora 34 just to test Gnome 40 and I was impressed with the battery life. Tested on ThinkPad T480 (Intel only graphics), I’m easily getting 7 hours of battery life (2x24W batteries). Mint 20.2 on the same system gives me max 3-4 hours. This is a huge difference and I was wondering is there anything that can be done to improve battery life on Mint?
Both Mint and Fedora were installed on clean SSD and I didn’t installed any software – just checked battery life using distribution default software installed. I would really like to see at least similar battery life in my favorite distro.
So yet again, we cannot adjust colors/themes ourselves, we have to rely on Mint Team. Even thought we asked about it for many years now!
Does this mean that you think you can make better choices for us instead of giving us the possibility create color schemes and adjustments to all elements?
Sorry if it sound harsh, but for so many years it was asked and nothing has happened…
I’m not happy about allot of change but some must happen. Keep the Minty-Darker that’s the ONLY theme I use! Perhaps when full system wide Dark mode is supported! Archive it only then and get rid of the others Like Brown, Blue & Most of the Bright A$$ themes! You can make room for 1. There is more crud than Minty Darker that needs Repo’d. Perhaps including a “Tips” script to trim/remove foreign languages or ask about said theme! An aggravating notice (like how you do with backup/drivers) would be a great start. Becoming modern could mean installing Filezilla, Bless hex, VLC & a working Win Emu/VM. A working WINE setup or a guided/pre-installed Virtualbox or other Free & EASY. I occasionally need to use an exe. That’s a PIA to have to reboot because its easier and faster than whipping up a VM or setting up WINE that rarely works. Plus a waste of space. Oh and remove that turd MONO what good is it? It doesn’t help me but uses more space than Minty-Darker. Does M$ / Xamarin really contribute that much to Mint? Been a Mint user since around v11 possibly earlier. I never had it work with any exe or anything. A Whats this would be useful for Mint. Kinda like a library or Help that’s EASY to find & USE! I don’t always have super fast internet. I shouldn’t have to Google everything about Mint that I don’t know or forgot! There are examples on multiple systems so it (Script & Help) could be coded however. I’m on the fence with the website too. I would place a Icon/Button for Sponsors/Donors somewhere noticeable. Perhaps Clicking on the M in mint!?! (Easter Egg?) I would consider approaching/reaching out to Lenovo & Steam to make it easier to support those machines. I have a laptop that came with those god awful stickers plastered everywhere. With No support, unless I do it myself! Most people are not very smart about computers One of the weirdest parts about buying a modern laptop is the fact nobody IMO uses the DATA (hdd) properly, makes it easy to use or easy to repair. I started on Apple Mac in 1992, then PC and settled on Mint/Win dualboot.These are my minor gripes about Mint and computing in general. I mostly do media stuff (FF,Torrent,VLC,Network/NAS/FTP) with the occasional Phone/Electronic Hack or Mod.
I really do appreciate your hard work! It takes my mind off said drama and makes me feel better if only for a little while..
Really good to hear that Cinnamon might be getting some performance improvements soon. I’m quite happy with the looks as they are but I have found that Cinnamon currently drops more frames than KDE when it comes to playing demanding videos or games. Hopefully some of the recent improvements to Mutter can be ported across.
Clem my friend whe ncan we expect LMDE5?
I have been using a computer since 20 year’s now and your version is quite excellent. Security and privacy are important for me and Linux Mint Cinnamon recent 64bit version is excellent. Keep up the good work.
Cheer’s Dan
Big PP is humanities first and last line of defense.
After installing Mate 20.0 the printer/scanner recognition, and function is gone.
I have 19.3 on another puter. When I power up the usb connected , a graphic appears, the psc is recognized, the drivers are installed, and both functions work. With Mate 20, this is not the case, the psc is recognized , but does not function. I have a thread in the hardware forum. a Mate 20 update needs to have this addressed. It would be much appreciated by me and others with the same problem. Thanks
I really like the new Mint Y accent, It’s nicer than the actual . Thanks !!
A question regarding windows and windows buttons (close window “X” in particular) in Cinnamon:
Am I the only one, that gets often windows that are apparently maximized but in fact they are not?
It is matter of 1-2mm.. not more.
That would be not a huge problem… if it would not be tricky to get the “x” button at the first try with my coursor when attempting to close the window.
That is really annoying.
I think the area of the “X” button should be bigger.
Thanks.
Will 20.3 MATE have mate 1.26 DE?? ETA for BETA ?
Will LMDE 5 have MATE? ETA for BETA?
Will libc6 be updated in the new release?
“Installing packages:”
======================================================================
Preparing to install Linux ‘5.14.12’
libc6_found: 2.31
libc6_minimum: 2.34
Will Mint ever going to stop pretending that X is alive and well and begin migrating to Wayland? On a side note, can we see some AMD-based Mint-boxes in the future, without Nvidia…
Adding here: I get it that it’s a large undertaking, but X11 just needs to be laid to rest already. Middleware layers need to go too, X11 on Wayland is just blurry for anyone using hiDPI and forget almost all hiDPI setups on X11 that aren’t 200%.
Did I miss something?
I personally like current theme with dark-grey on the left of the panel and with ‘two-arrows’ unfold button for windows. If I loose this theme style – it will be the most uncomfortable and controversial feature in theming decisions you make.
Will I be able to use current theme in new release? Honestly, I have read an article twice but still don’t get the point of described changes. You do these changes for what? And for who?
The best is the enemy of the good. You know it, right?
linux-meta-hwe-5.11 (5.11.0.38.42~20.04.17) focal; urgency=medium Kernel.
RTL8821CE 802.11ac WiFi broken with this kernel and I’ve tried the Laptop(ASUS Tuf FX505DY-WH51) with Secure Boot Enabled and Disabled to see if it was any kernel signing issue from the open source driver(Out of Tree) for that WiFi hardware. So that’s not it AFAIK, but just reporting that to you.
I’m having a few issues since the update to Cinnamon v5.06 on the 16th Oct.
– nothing working when clicking backgrounds, or system settings
anyone else having this issue … I’m using LM 20.2, 64bit.
I’m trying to see if it’s easy to go back to cinnamon v5.05 … via the terminal ?
Website looks better indeed.
We can still see it’s done by engineers though:
– no USP,
– talking about features before talking about benefits,
– using cryptic acronyms,
– improvable copywriting (esp. in h2)
Something like this might make Mint’s website clearer to people new to Linux (if that is the goal?) :
http://uploads.borispaing.fr/linuxmint.com-apres.png
Each to their own I guess, but I think the best styles are the ones where the entire title-bar is highlighted for the current active window.
The default Mint-Y ones just look ‘wrong’ – the windows gadgets are too tiny and indistinct, then colours are dull…
The key is to use the right window-manager. I always switch to Kokodi as the default window-manager and that, combined the the “Mint-X Aqua” style, just looks soooo good…
Thanks for sharing, its helpful
Kernel 5.11.0.37.41-20.04.16 (This works fine for Wifi and I had to revert to this kernel from the latest 5.11 Kernel because that Kernel broke WiFI on the ASUS TUF laptop)
Package rtl8821ce=5.5.2.1-oubuntu4~20.4.4 (This Package Breaks WiFi even on the Kernel Above that I reverted to)
This Update Breaks WiFi on ASUS TUF Laptop(FX505DY-WH51) so before this update package, the kernel listed above worked fine for WiFi on that laptop. It should be noted that the next kernel after this one listed above also breaks WiFi on the laptop so I’m holding at the current 5.11 HWE kernel listed above and have also non-whitelisted the rtl8821ce=5.5.2.1-oubuntu4~20.4.4 update package.
Apparently the solution to this is to reboot twice and I had the same issue with this update and the 5.13 Kernel and I suspect that it’s that Key signing nonsense but after that it works with my Kernel 5.13 update and the journalctl -b boot log no longer shows any Kernel taint from the WiFi opensource driver for this Realtek WiFi hardware/Driver.
Let me add my voice to the crowd who thinks the new website is in absolutely no way an improvement over the old one. And I’m phrasing this extremely kindly.
The new website looks great, but unfortunately all Mint websites still misuse images – not optimized for small size. Simply put, a large color palette will give better results with JPEG (95% quality when it has to look great, or 85-90% quality when there’s no need for fine details), and a small color palette is a lot better with PNG. With large images, pages load slower and they’re bad for small mobile data caps. To makes it worse, taking a longer time to serve the images creates a bottleneck for the server too.
accent.png = 1369604 bytes
accent.jpg = 349413 bytes (90% quality, very good for this image)
accent.jpg = 268255 bytes (85% quality, barely visible loss)
* GIMP used to export to JPG
Great use case for PNG:
colors.png = 102711 bytes
Regarding Nemo, I hope the default theme will have a good visual separation (background) between the sidebar and the directory listing area, not as presented in the Accents screenshots. Better contrast between the two areas make them more comfortable to use and it reduces misclicking.
sidebar: #eff2f2
listing: #fcfdfe
* https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ <- not the best tool here, but good to point out the tiny difference between the two backgrounds
Anyway, I look forward to seeing 20.3 in testing, then released. 🙂
Also, PNG should not be used to add shadowed borders to transparent images. We no longer use archaic browsers, and a single line of CSS can create the same effect with the box-shadow property.
“Can I use” shows that 98.35% of the browsers don’t even need a prefix to properly render the shadow, so it’s safe to use as a single line of CSS.
* https://caniuse.com/css-boxshadow
Switching to CSS shadows gives you the freedom to use whatever image format has the smallest file size.
Example: box-shadow: 2px 2px 10px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.6);
* https://cssgenerator.org/box-shadow-css-generator.html
I really like the Mint-X themes. Been using them for 6 years since I switched to Mint.
Hello. Thanks for the good work to the whole team.
I wanted to propose to introduce an amendment to the display of notifications in the tray in Cinnamon, namely, after restarting the computer, all notifications disappear in the system tray, I wanted me to be able to read and delete notifications manually, as it is done in Gnome. It happens that a lot of notifications accumulate and I do not notice everyone, and the main problem is that after restarting the computer, all notifications disappear, so that after the restart, all notifications remain until I read them and clear them myself. Please take care of this issue, this is very important for many people.
Uma, Una – folks are going to become confused.
I’ve run into something with Xed. If you are working with a large document, say log files or data dumps, that can be 1000’s of lines, then when viewing the end of the file, the last line(s) vanish or are 1/2 cut off. With search/replace it gets worse, but closing search/replace does not fix the display issue.
Also with Pix, there might be a memory leak somewhere as it spontaneously will close. From what I can deduce, mostly when moving from a video (mp4) to the next file, but it is random, sometimes between vanilla jpegs.
Great news Clem, thank you. I use LM in Ubuntu and Debian version every day, and it’s a pleasure !!!
When i turn on my laptopHP ProBook 4340s (i3-3110M, 4gb ram, sata ssd, lm 20.2 cinnamon, 5.4.0-89-generic kernel) and very quickly enter my password and hit enter, cinnamon starts without startup sound. If i wait for 4 or 5 seconds and then hit enter (after introducing password) cinnamon do have the startup sound. This thing is happens even on reboot. This is not happened after logout and login (i have tested with only one account – my account is the only one).
Thank you for Linux Mint Cinnamon!
why Usn 5114-1 Linux kernel vulnerability for kernel update for 4.15lts on 19.2 was problematic with many cases of conditions race. are the workers mainterners kernel on strike?
Hi, Clem. I would like to mantain my nemo’s theme with the gray side bar (I have visual problems with the light themes). Are you going to keep a “darker” Mint-Y theme (like the Arc-Darker theme)?
Clem,
Maybe it’s because I don’t understand computers, but why put all that effort into a system based on Ubuntu that in turn is based on Debian? Why not put all your energy into LMDE? I would skip the Ubuntu intermediate step, then you don’t need Canonical with all its idiosyncrasies. But maybe I’m not understanding correctly, I’m not a developer.
Cees
No updates for LMDE!
Repository ‘http://security.debian.org buster/updates InRelease’ changed its ‘Suite’ value from ‘stable’ to ‘oldstable’This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repository can be applied. See apt-secure(8) manpage for details.Repository ‘https://deb.debian.org/debian buster InRelease’ changed its ‘Version’ value from ‘10.3’ to ‘10.11’Repository ‘https://deb.debian.org/debian buster InRelease’ changed its ‘Suite’ value from ‘stable’ to ‘oldstable’This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repository can be applied. See apt-secure(8) manpage for details.Repository ‘https://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates InRelease’ changed its ‘Suite’ value from ‘stable-updates’ to ‘oldstable-updates’
Failed to fetch https://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/appstream-glib/gir1.2-appstreamglib-1.0_0.7.14-1_amd64.deb
404 Not Found [IP: 199.232.18.132 443]
What to do in this situation?
Mint team, what do you think of the Brave Browser and making it available ootb?
I would agree with Andreas’ suggestion query of making Brave yet even
the Dissenter browser available out of the box.
making either one the default browser or at least one of them
and make available in the menu to then let the user decide to
make default browser or not. while still shipping firefox.
i haven’t used linux mint in awhile now, yet i still come by to look at updates and progress.
nice to follow at times. shalom.
Maybe it’s because I don’t understand computers, but why put all that effort into a system based on Ubuntu that in turn is based on Debian? Why not put all your energy into LMDE? I would skip the Ubuntu intermediate step, then you don’t need Canonical with all its idiosyncrasies. But maybe I’m not understanding correctly, I’m not a developer.
Clem, thank you for your comprehensive answer to my question. It’s clear to me now.
Please add a “light” theme with both the windows and taskbar light and change the name of the current light theme to “default” or “mixed”
I hope you use a new kernel. Cant boot Linux Mint with my PC because the kernel you guys are using is goddamn old. Please use 5.14 or newer…
Just in case it helps, you didn’t mention if you tried Edge or not, Edge comes with 5.11, which although older than 5.14 is newer than the 5.8 LTS kernel we ship with.
https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/edge.html
Hey Clem, Mint themes are some of the best. Since we’re on the topic I wanted to ask why icons in LibreOffice on Cinnamon are automatically set to Tango, when on the Mate desktop they are automatically set to Colibre? Tango icons are terrible in dark themes. Just try to set cell borders in LibreOffice Calc with the toolbar button. Then switch to Colibre and you will be shocked at how much better it is.
Thanks Ethan, we’ll look into it.
For myself I prefer that the top info strips be small. Ever since the screen was reduced to a 9×16 format I have worked to get everything off the top and bottom of the screen, I have my tool bar to one side. So keep the top info small. Thanks
Thanks for doing God’s work!!! You all are incredibly talented and totally awesome.
Will there be Emacs27 in Linux Mint 20.3 by default?
which date for activate on lm19.2 the command sudo ua attach [token] for ESM?
Wow….
“We use Linux because it’s better, not because it’s free or because it’s old or because it didn’t embrace controversial design changes. We use it because it’s fast, because it works, because it does what we want. ”
True that!
The new theme work looks nice, I hope the title bar buttons aren’t blurry in chromium browsers this time around though.
Thank you for your great work.
There would be a small thing to implement in the Cinnamon GUI: the ability to make the Bluetooth not visible (not discoverable):
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=277048
Thanks
Looks really nice, but please don’t remove accent colors. I love to make combinations so my desktop is unique.
I am very excited for this update and thanks to the mint team for your hard work. 🙂
Linux mint is one of the best distros for desktop.
personally, I would like to see all the windows and docks 100% transparent (NOT the icons or launchers) Simple dock does most of the panel but not all, and none of the windows are transparent so its a bit discouraging.