Linux Mint has forked and modified many GNOME and GTK applications to keep them working with the Linux distro’s custom theme support. The team is now trying a new approach that would allow more current apps to work, without extensive modification or fully killing theme support.
Linux Mint has pushed back against many modern trends in the desktop Linux ecosystem, like the rise of Snap packages and the decline of user-configurable themes. The primary Cinnamon desktop environment also has a more traditional taskbar, applications menu, and applet bar than you get in GNOME Shell. However, all those modifications make it harder to integrate newer versions of system components and applications.
The Linux Mint developers said in a blog post, “A year ago we complained about libAdwaita, not because it was bad, but because it didn’t support us. Applications made with this library only properly integrated with GNOME and broke functionality in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. With the release of Linux Mint 22, GNOME Apps which used libAdwaita were downgraded back to their GTK3 versions so that they could continue to function properly in the desktop environments we support. This was a temporary solution until these applications either got replaced, removed, forked, or until we found a way to continue to use them.”
Linux Mint is working on some changes to help it stay modern enough to work seamlessly with newer GTK4+ and GNOME applications. The team “made a few changes in libAdwaita to not use its own stylesheet,” and added libAdwaita support to the built-in Mint-X and Mint-Y themes. Flatpak libAdwaita applications can also use the system accent color. The result is that GNOME Calendar, Foliate, and other libAdwaita-based applications use the expected system colors.
At the same time, the default Mint themes are getting some minor tweaks to fit in better with libAdwaita apps and other modern interface trends. Some highlighted elements now use a blue color, and the color values for light and dark backgrounds are now slightly different. The team says this makes “the dark theme and Cinnamon elements are softer and much nicer looking” and “the themes look more modern.” Linux Mint is just changing some color values, nothing Earth-shattering.
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These updates should help Linux Mint use modern Linux applications while still giving its users some degree of control over their preferred experience. The team isn’t ready to throw in the towel on theme customization, but maintaining more and more parallel versions of GNOME applications just isn’t a good use of anyone’s time.
Linux Mint also confirmed that Mint 22.2 will be named ‘Zara,’ and LMDE 7 will be named ‘Gigi’. The current version is still 22.1.
Source: Linux Mint
