More details on the makeup of the upcoming Linux Mint 22.2 release have been revealed, including its new codename (for those who track those).
Linux Mint 22.2 (due to be released in late July or early August) has been officially named ‘Zara’, so continuing distro lead Clem’s codename convention of choosing female names in (somewhat) alphabetical order for each new version.
I only say somewhat since Linux Mint 22.1 release was dubbed ‘Xia‘, while Linux Mint 22.2 jumps straight to ‘Zara’.
Even with my lackadaisical attention to letter ordering, I know a ‘Y’ comes between ‘X’ and ‘Z’. Perhaps Clem had a dodgy date in the past with a Yara, Yasmin, Yvette, Yvonne or Yelena…
Anyway, the codename of the next version is not what most Linux Mint fans will care about.
No, top of the “ooh” list will be the changes made to its default theme.
Linux Mint 22.2 Goes Bluer
Linux Mint’s default ‘Mint Y’ theme is instantly recognisable: big slabs of grey, punctuated by colourful accents — that’s not changing.
What is changing is how that grey looks.
The team is introducing a steely blue tint to the grey base in Mint-Y in an effort to make it look more modern and a tad metallic, following the likes of Apple, Firefox and GNOME in doing so.
Why? Clem says:
“Pure grey is neutral, it can be perceived as cold or warm based on its surroundings. By bumping the blue […] we force it to look cold. This is common practice in UI design. Grey is rarely completely grey, it usually has a little bit more blue in it than red and green.”
When anything—project, distro, or brand—follows a design trend merely for trend’s sake, it’s often greeted by a derisive sigh and the audible thud of foreheads meeting desks.
Yet no-one need give themselves a bruise here. Mint’s move isn’t strictly meritless.
After all, the design of Linux Mint’s is viewed (and judged) amongst its peers. Clinging to past design conventions can make it look more dated, if only by comparison (read the comments under any Linux Mint post on this site and “dated” is a barb often thrown).
Yet there is also another reason why Linux Mint is following the crowd, and it has to do with its hitherto stated nemesis: libadwaita.
Maybe Libadwaita isn’t that bad…
Linux Mint makes it easy to install apps from Flathub. Its Software Manager tool is plugged into Flathub (Mint pre-configures Flathub to hide unverified apps by default) so that its users have access to the thousands of apps available there.
A huge number of those apps use GTK4libadwaita.
libadwaita is also a predominantly grey theme like Mint-Y, the subtle bump to blue should help improve visual harmony when running modern GTK4 apps alongside Mint’s (preferred) GTK3 ones.
And “subtle” is indeed the right term for this.
Clem himself most users would be unlikely to know something had changed unless pointed out (or enabling dark mode, where this adjustment results in apps which look “much softer than before.”).
Linux Mint 22.2 also tweaks the XDG Desktop Portal XApp to support accent colours, ensuring that the choice of accent colour set Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktops is picked up by and reflected in the UI of GTK4/libadwaita Flatpak apps.
Nice!
A libadwaita Lovefest? Not Quite…
Linux Mint’s opposition to GTK4/libadwaita apps is clearly thawing. Clem asks “Is there anything actually wrong with them once they follow the theme and provide proper window controls?”
Swimming against the tide with forks and downgrades of GTK4/libadwaita apps is ultimately futile
Rather than continuing to downgrade or fork pre-GTK4 apps (as it has in Linux Mint 22), a sustainable compromise is being explored.
Mint-X and Mint-Y themes gain custom libadwaita stylesheets, and changes have been made to the system libadwaita package to tell it to not use its own stylesheet.
The result: a pragmatic approach to the way modern apps look on Mint.
While the changes can’t restore traditional menu bars or undo client-side decorations, they should make GTK4 apps feel more like welcome guests when running on Mint users’ desktops rather than, as often, unwanted visitors.
Mint plans to look into creating their own XApp platform library or downstream extension library to make its approach maintainable long-term. The exact details are WIP/TBD, but promising all the same.
Swimming against the tide with forks and downgrades is ultimately futile. Linux Mint doesn’t have to embrace libadwaita-style UI and UX changes itself, but it certainly makes sense to engage with the world as it is, not how it might prefer it to be.
In all, a solid set of developments that add the other changes we can expect to find in Linux Mint 22.2 when it goes stable in the summer.