We’ve experimented with Aurora GTK engines and created some futuristic themes. We’ve looked at Carbon and made something a lot of people liked but although a few themes ended up looking great we still haven’t found anything to replace the default artwork. So we’re now taking a different approach which consists of improving the Daryna artwork by making subtle changes to it. Have a look below and please give us as much feedback as possible on this.

This is how widgets (“widget” means graphical element. Buttons, progress bars, combos are widgets for instance) looked like in Daryna:

This is how these same widgets look like after we made some changes:

And these are the changes we made:

To illustrate the differences, here is mintUpdate running with the Daryna look:

And here is how it looks like with the changes:

I’m personally happy about the sliders taken from Clearlooks. That’s definitely an improvement IMHO. I’m not sure whether I prefer the gradients or the original for the tabbed folders. I like the lighter blue and the additional contrast but I’m afraid there’s too much contrast in the newer theme.. I also like the dotted separation between columns in the mintUpdate table. Finally, the highlighting (especially on the buttons) looks like a wave and that’s fine, but now that the contrast shows that more in detail, maybe we can opt for a straight highlight instead. Oh.. and note how widgets are still rounded, but not as much as before.

Please tell us what you think. Not just whether you like it or not, but in detail what you think is better, what you think isn’t, and why and how you would improve it. Don’t hesitate to save these pictures locally so you can quickly look at them and compare them in fullscreen mode.

PS: Other themes will be available as alternative choices, installed by default also.

The Linux Mint web server was down for periods of time today and yesterday. I would like to apologize for this. The first problem occured after a library update broke the bindings used by Apache and we had to recompile the HTTP server. I personally blame Gentoo for this although Michael K. (the server admin) disagrees with me on this one. The second problem occured after I decided to add news on the start page. With every visit on this page trigerring a PHP generated RSS request and consequently database connections the server went down pretty fast. We found 33GB of logs had been generated overnight… Michael reminded me I hadn’t been very smart on this one and the news on the start page are now generated by a separated script.

It can be quite worrying for Mint users when linuxmint.com goes down as not only do the website, the forums, the software portal and the wiki go down, but that also breaks the start page, the repositories and mintUpdate from working correctly. Starting with Elyssa the repositories and mintUpdate will migrate to the file server. A company website will also be available and distinct from linuxmint.com so users have a place to go and to find news in case downtimes happen again.

Sorry for the downtime and let’s hope it won’t happen again anytime soon.