{"id":4149,"date":"2021-10-01T14:02:12","date_gmt":"2021-10-01T13:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=4149"},"modified":"2021-10-01T14:05:58","modified_gmt":"2021-10-01T13:05:58","slug":"monthly-news-september-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=4149","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News – September 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Linux Mint 20.3 Una<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

LMDE 5 Elsie<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

New website<\/strong><\/p>\n

The new website is now fully ready and live on https:\/\/www.linuxmint.com<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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how amazing the previous website looked when it was made in 2009, but what looked amazing then just simply looks outdated now.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.<\/p>\n

Titlebars<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Accents<\/strong><\/p>\n

The current Mint-Y theme is a grey theme with many “accents”.<\/p>\n

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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<\/p>\n

Accents make the theme look nice, catchy, vibrant, fun even… especially on top of grey which can be quite austere.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We’ll keep color inversions on small widgets (text entries, maybe the sidebar) but we’ll remove them in large areas.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Colors<\/strong><\/p>\n

The greys underneath are tinted just a tiny bit (2% in the screenshot below).<\/p>\n

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This brings back a bit of fun to the theme and makes it look pleasant.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Dark Apps<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s an example with Mint-Y-Purple:<\/p>\n

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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:<\/p>\n