APT tool replacements also in the works

Linux Mint Tease ‘Improved’ Default Cinnamon Theme

The Cinnamon desktop environment looks pretty nice on Linux Mint, but if you install it on other distributions it doesn’t look as good — but that’s about to change.

In his latest monthly mail-shot, distro lead Clement Lefebvre says the “ugly” default Cinnamon theme, which is maintained for trouble-shooting and testing purpose and is not the theme Linux Mint itself sets as default, will be “much improved” in Cinnamon 5.4.

“In our distribution the focus is on Mint-Y. The default Cinnamon theme […] rarely gets attention from theme artists,” he says.

“Ideally, it is the responsibility of the distributions to make things look good. In practice, many do not maintain their own themes, focus on other desktops or insist on using default settings.”

Exciting change.

The plethora of third-party Cinnamon themes show just how attractive this desktop can look, so offering a better-looking ‘vanilla’ theme will make a better impression with those installing Cinnamon desktop on other distros.

That’s not the only thing changing, either.

APT Forks/Replacements

Linux Mint plan to “clean up, rationalize and modernize the tools and libraries” it relies on, with an initial focus on simplifying APT (which is not a single thing but made up of a myriad of tools and libraries, some of which are decades old and no longer maintained).

Patching has been the go-to solution, but Mint’s come to the conclusion “…their design, their translations, the features they provide are stuck in the past. Every Mint release is a reminder of this and a list of long-lasting paper cuts which we’re unable to address.”

Pruning the packages used by the underlying package manager means a handful of common tools in Linux Mint will (in future updates) be removed or replaced, depending on what’s needed.

Captain is a new unified tool for Linux Mint that replaces Gdebi and apturl.

Gdebi is a standalone GUI installer for DEB packages and while it works just fine it is no longer actively maintained. Meanwhile, apturl is a Canonical creation (from the days of the Ubuntu Software Center) to handle apt:url links, e.g., click this.

Aptkit is Linux Mint’s new library that combines the functionality of aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon into a single package.

Anything in Linux Mint which currently relys on aptdaemon, Synaptic, apturl, et al will transition to using Aptkit and Captain going forward.

Users won’t “see much difference” on their desktop, Mint say, but say ‘paper cuts’ and other issues inherent in the old version will be resolved, and should new bugs crop-up in its home-grown replacements, it will be able to fix the cause, not patch.

Linux Mint 22.1 will be the next release of this Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, expected for release towards the end of the year. Linux Mint 22, released earlier this year, and based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, is the newest stable version.