Linux Mint 21.2 will improve its color palette in icons and themes

Clem lefebvre posted a new monthly note, the one corresponding to March 2023. In it, he has talked about several changes that have been successful, such as the new theme Mint-Y, which has kept the old one for those who do not like the new and has been added various third party themes such as Yaru, Numix, Breeze and cursor themes. But there have been things that have caught their attention, and they will make changes again in Linux Mint 21.2.

Clem says that so much variety makes it hard to find a specific topic. Some icon themes work well with some UI themes, but not with others. The welcome screen offers an option to quickly switch from light to dark theme and from one color to another, but this has its limits: it only works with the Mint-Y theme and only on Linux Mint. Therefore, they have decided to take action.

Linux Mint 21.2 will remove things to improve consistency

The first step they will take is simplify things. The brown shadows have been removed as they are the same color as Sand. On the other hand, the line that is in some icons, like those of the folders, was not one of those changes that I liked, so it will be removed.

The monochrome icons will also disappear. GTK allows "symbolic" icons, which, among other things, can change color depending on whether an item is selected or not. For example, in a list of editions where there are cut, copy and paste options, if the icon is monochrome it will always be a color, such as grey, but if the symbolic icon is used, when it is selected it can change to white on the background with the accent color. This is something that can be more noticeable if the chosen theme is dark.

As for the icons of other apps, such as Transmission (Torrent network client), they will remove all monochrome icons and all dark icon themes. In apps that still use them, full-color icons will use those of adwaita default.

Cinnamon Styles

The next version of Cinnamon will include a new concept that they have called «Styles». Each style will have three modes: blended, dark, and light. Each of these modes can contain color variants, which are a combination of themes that work well when used together. The intent of all of this is to make it very easy to switch to something that looks good, and quickly navigate to what's there, no matter how many individual themes you have installed, and without having to find elements that look good next to each other.

The “places” icons now have two shades, and as examples, these:

Lefebvre's team wants all of this to work everywhere in the future, and not just in Linux Mint 21.2 and the next release of Cinnamon. Nor in his own topics; Cinnamon styles will work, or so they hope, in other distributions and in third-party themes.

As information for designers, these styles are defined in JSON in the path /usr/share/cinnamon/styles.d/. Files are read in alphabetical order, and styles can be overwritten if they have the same name. This is designed to allow distributions and/or theme creators to define their own styles. Cinnamon provides style definitions for Adwaita. Mint provides additional style definitions for its own themes. They have also made it easy for designers to create themes of icons for Mint-Y.

Available in summer

They haven't explained it today, but it's known Than Linux Mint 21.2 will arrive at the end of june with the code name of Victoria. It will include full support for HEIF and AVIF image formats, as well as they have promised better integration with flatpak packages. As it could not be otherwise, they will also take advantage of the time to improve their own applications, such as a Warpinator to which it is known that, at least, they will add several security patches.