Linux Mint team has informed that, Linux Mint 18, upcoming stable release of popular GNU/Linux distribution will be featuring a new flat theme. This new theme is inspired by other popular flat themes like 'Arc' and 'Moka' and will be known as 'Mint-Y'.
The Linux Mint team is yet to decide whether completely roll out new theme at once or introduce it in phases by providing support for both existing 'Mint-X' and new 'Mint-Y' themes simultaneously.
When Linux Mint team started discussions over new theme, there were mainly two kind of responses from users. First one was excitement to have a new theme, other one was concerns about changes in new theme and it's effect on productivity. To address these concerns, 'Mint-Y' is theme is designed to be close enough to 'Mint-X' theme in functionality.
The Linux Mint team is yet to decide whether completely roll out new theme at once or introduce it in phases by providing support for both existing 'Mint-X' and new 'Mint-Y' themes simultaneously.
When Linux Mint team started discussions over new theme, there were mainly two kind of responses from users. First one was excitement to have a new theme, other one was concerns about changes in new theme and it's effect on productivity. To address these concerns, 'Mint-Y' is theme is designed to be close enough to 'Mint-X' theme in functionality.
Both themes will be installed by default in Linux Mint 18, and the theme used by default will be “Mint-X”, giving Linux Mint 18 the exact same default look at Linux Mint 17.For more information, see official announcement made by Linux Mint team in their monthly news letter.
But we’ll also continue to work on the “Mint-Y” theme, and not only leading towards Linux Mint 18, but also after its release.
You might wonder why we’re not using this new theme as default right now.. and there’s a couple of reasons:
- We want to know how much you like it. Not just by looking at screenshots, but by using it, for 6 months, for a year. We don’t want to change styles just because we think it might “look” better, we’ll provide both styles to you and eventually if the day comes where a huge majority prefer the new theme, then we’ll follow that and start using it as the new default.
- We want it to mature. Right now it works and there are only a couple of known issues with it, but as you, millions of users, starts using it and confronting it to the hundreds of thousands of available applications out there I’m sure you’re going to find a lot of paper cuts with it. Mint-X has been carefully tuned and improved for years thanks to your feedback. Mint-Y is brand new and it needs some of that.
- We want your feedback to impact its design. Although some aspects are finalized, others are likely to change. Your feedback will help us with tints and colors. Icons in particular aren’t something we’re satisfied with (although app icons look pretty good, places, mimes, status icons are still largely undecided). We want to get people talking about this, contributing to the theme on github, experimenting with ideas and alternatives and this becomes much easier if everybody already runs Linux Mint 18 and has the theme installed.