The good news for fans of the popular Linux disro Linux Mint does not stop. As you probably know, earlier this month the project got a new revamped website. It looks really minty and it looks modern.
Linux Mint’s original website looked dated and potentially unattractive to new-age computer users. The new Mint’s website does a better job than before at welcoming newcomers, explaining what Linux Mint is, why people love it and how to install it.
It is interesting to note that the new Mint’s website no longer shows ads. As Clement Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, says:
These were tough decisions to take because they immediately reduce our income but they also make Linux Mint look more serious and professional.
But now let’s focus on the bigger news. In the regular monthly updates, Linux Mint team announced that the next Linux Mint 20.3 release is planned for Christmas and will contain some interesting updates.
What to Expect from Linux Mint 20.3
Now we know not only the name of Linux Mint 20.3, but also the nickname of the upcoming LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) version. Following the Mint tradition of using only female names, the Linux Mint 20.3 will be called “Una”, while LMDE 5 will be called “Elsie”.
LMDE 5 “Elsie” will be based on Debian 11, ship with a Cinnamon desktop environment and will support both amd64 and i386 architectures.
Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” is planned to arrive for Christmas and will come in 3 flavors: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.
The announcement also inform that once the website is complete, all efforts are now focused on improving the appearance of Linux Mint 20.3.
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.
So what does this mean? Above all, the Mint devs will make the titlebars rounder with bigger buttons to make the desktop look more satisfying and to make it easier to press the buttons.
Furthermore, to make Linux Mint 20.3 look more pleasant, some accents will be removed from the Mint-Y theme and inject a tiny bit of tint into shades of grey.
Small widgets such as sliders, checkboxes, radios and the close button will continue to provide your favorite highlight color while the rest of the theme takes a step back and looks more neutral than before.
In the current Mint’s theme, selections use inverted colors. The devs have decided to keep color inversions on small widgets in Linux Mint 20.3, but will remove them from the large ones. The greys underneath are also tinted just a tiny bit.
In addition, the devs also promise new dark themes and other visual enhancements. They hope that Linux Mint users will be excited with these visual changes and that they will be well received.
For detailed information you can refer to the official announcement.
At this point this news doesn’t do much for me. When I originally tried to install Mint 20 MATE it created its own partitions, including a Windows partition, and would not install on my selected partition. At that time I stopped using Mint and replaced it with MX Linux on 3 of my 4 laptops. The 4th laptop is connected to my main TV and it runs Mint 18.3 because of its low memory footprint. In the future I may consider LMDE 5 since Debian based distros tend to be far more stable than Ubuntu based.