We’re working on a new design for our main website. When the current design (and logo) were originally designed they carried a strong identity and we grew quite attached to them. For a while now we were hoping to get a new unique design which would look brand new but still carry that very same feel, and that was very hard to achieve. In the meantime, we stayed with something that was stuck in the past and that just doesn’t work well nowadays. We’ve heard many people ask why our website looks so old, and I think it’s time we do something about that.<\/p>\n
Rather than waiting forever for the perfect design, we decided to purchase modern looking designs which were based on Bootstrap and to use them to build something clean, that would work on all devices and that could be maintained and modified easily going forward.<\/p>\n
Here is a quick preview of what we’re working on. Bear in mind that some elements are likely to change:<\/p>\n
The layout above is used by content pages. The main landing page has a different layout, with no sidebar, less text and more prominent elements to introduce what Linux Mint is and present its main features.<\/p>\n We’re currently focusing our efforts on the header bar and the sponsors section.<\/p>\n The header bar should receive a background or a texture which will make it more minty and give the website more identity. Its navigation menu will also be centered and placed below the title to allow for a larger logo.<\/p>\n In the sponsors section we’re hoping to use monochrome logos which will fit better with the design.<\/p>\n The round Mint logo is a work in progress and it’s something we’re experimenting with, to tackle some of the issues we have with the current logo:<\/p>\n We’ve been working around these issues for a while now. In previous releases we shipped with flat, semi-flat and symbolic versions of the current logo (your application menu logo in 19.1 is an example of this) but we can’t address all the issues without removing that border in the shape of a leaf.<\/p>\n One the one hand, it’s hard because we’re attached to it, it’s a strong visual symbol and it’s been part of our identity. On the other hand it opens the door to crisper visuals, better looking panels, menus and splash screens so we’re looking into it.<\/p>\n Performance improvements in Cinnamon<\/strong><\/p>\n Some of the performance improvements we talked about last month landed in Cinnamon. The window manager received many changes to further decrease input lag and the application menu applet now loads and runs twice as fast as before.<\/p>\n DocInfo and AppSys, two very important internal components were reviewed and simplified.<\/p>\n The cinnamon-menus library was ported to Meson and is currently being reviewed and simplified by Stephen Collins.<\/p>\n Improvements in the Mint tools<\/strong><\/p>\n gm10 is leading the charge in improving the Mint tools.<\/p>\n Here’s a preview of what landed in the Update Manager already:<\/p>\n The cache used by the Software Manager was moved to mint-common, turned into a Python module and given the ability to recognize manually installed software. This is achieved by analyzing the installer logs coming from Ubiquity. As a consequence, in Linux Mint, the Backup Tool and the Software Manager will be able to share the same cache and to list not only the applications which were installed via the Software Manager, but also the applications which were installed via other means.<\/p>\n System Reports<\/strong><\/p>\n We spent some time working on mintreport, the “System Reports” tool.<\/p>\n The user interface now features an XApp sidebar and a new page was added to show the system information and make it easy for users to copy it into the forums or upload it to a pastebin website.<\/p>\n We’re also happy to announce mintreport is coming to LMDE 3. In the past, mintreport relied on Ubuntu’s “apport” to collect and generate crash reports. It now uses systemd-coredump which adds more information to the stack traces and is available in other distributions.<\/p>\n Sponsorships:<\/strong><\/p>\n Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.linuxmint.com\/tmp\/blog\/3732\/design.png\")
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