Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has revealed the names of the upcoming Linux Mint 22.2 and LMDE 7. Linux Mint 22.2, which is due for release around July, will be called Zara, while LMDE 7, which is due around June, will be called Gigi and based on Debian 13.
In addition to these codenames, Lefebvre also announced that the Mint-Y theme, which is used by default, has received an ever so slight color change to fit with modern design principles. The light theme has had the blue increased to make it look more metallic and modern. The increased blue makes it look more cold, rather than the neutral that you get from standard gray.
Lefebvre also said that libAdwaita, used in Flatpak applications, has also recently made the color shift so things should look a bit more uniform. Overall, these color changes make the themes look more modern and the dark theme and Cinnamon elements are “softer and much nicer looking”.
On the themes front, a small change has been made to something called the XDG Desktop Portal XApp. The change means that Flatpak apps that use libAdwaita can now use the accent color you’ve set in Linux Mint, making apps blend into your desktop better.
Finally, Lefebvre said some efforts have been taken to try and make libAdwaita apps work better with Linux Mint. These apps are designed for GNOME and do not play well at all with other desktop environments like Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce which Mint offers.
To try to make them work better, the Mint team has updated its Mint-Y and Mint-X themes to align more with libAdwaita’s colors and it has modified libAdwaita itself to not enforce its own stylesheet and respect the system theme. This approach has shown good results when tested with GNOME Calendar, GNOME Characters, and Foliate.
With this said, the Mint team still wants a sustainable solution long term. It could continue to patch libAdwaita, create an XApp platform library like libAdwaita but for wider desktop support, or fork applications, but the team isn’t keen on this last option as it’s seen as needlessly duplicating apps.
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