Show HN: Linux Mint Redesign Proposal

https://github.com/klad-design/linuxmint-brand

by zmaznevegor • 2 years ago

57 42 2 years ago

github.com

After several months of work together with other designers, want to announce a Linux Mint redesign proposal.

First time posting, hope you like it!

rubenburdin• 2 years ago

I love it! Beautifully redesigned, worth a try!

zmaznevegor6• 2 years ago

Many thanks! Trying to push an initiative for some time but decided that a concept speaks better than anything else. Hope Clem and team considers it

Ksu_yolk• 2 years ago

Fresh, great!

zmaznevegor6• 2 years ago

Thanks!

dkrvchnk• 2 years ago

Looks amazing! <3

righthand• 2 years ago

Disappointing, because it just makes Linux Mint look like every other Linux Desktop with a dock and floating menu bars.

For a distribution that is known to be Windows-like this is a huge step away from that identity and frankly makes LM feel like KDE Plasma.

complaintdept• 2 years ago

That logo reads ambiguously...In top-to-bottom left-to-right languages you may not be sure which letter to read first, the 'M,' (top but rightmost) or the 'L' (bottom but leftmost). I'd propose making the 'M' a little smaller, and/or moving it closer to the 'L' so it looks more like a superscript at first glance. Maybe also differentiating the two with different cases and/or the 'M' in italics or script.

tsimionescu• 2 years ago

Instead of presenting users with a pre-customized environment and default wallpaper, we introduced a new step in the installation process. Users can now select their preferred desktop layout before the first boot, easing the transition for newcomers and showcasing Linux's customization capabilities early on.

When installing a new OS, I want the OS to be up and running as soon as possible, so I can then install everything else I'll need, connect all my accounts, perhaps restore an old backup or sync with some source of settings.

As such, installation should never include unnecessary steps like this. There's a good chance that the image I want is in some remote drive that I first need to connect/login to. Making me choose some arbitrary image before I can get to the actual running OS is very unlikely to be helpful.

zmaznevegor6• 2 years ago

Sorry, I think I formulated it not quite precisely.

Selecting a background image is not an extra step in installation, but the layout choice is. My idea was that Linux Mint is one of the top choices for the new Linux users who migrate from Mac or Wn, that's why I wanted them to have a possibility of adding a familoar layout. See this step here: https://github.com/klad-design/linuxmint-brand/blob/main/OS%...

The idea with a blank background is that the system can look without a background image overall and with just filled screen. You can see more "first load after installation" examples here: https://github.com/klad-design/linuxmint-brand/tree/main/OS%...

eikenberry• 2 years ago

This is like anything other large installation process. You provide a sensible default and an option to just go with defaults vs. being presented with options. This keeps people who want an express process happy while allowing others more customization. Win-win.

carlosjobim• 2 years ago

You're wrong. Installing a new OS is something done very rarely by people who are not hackers or sys admins. Meaning they have time to set it up once how they like it and how it will stay for years of computer use.

If you buy a new car you might want to get the model and the color you like, or do you say "I don't give a damn just give me the keys so I can get going!"

sirwhinesalot• 2 years ago

About as fresh looking as iOS7 back in 2013, which is to say it's 11 years out of fashion, and I already didn't like it back then.

Not wanting to be too harsh, there are aspects that I like, but it doesn't "wow" me in any way. OSS design continuing the tradition of mimicking commercial software years after the fact.

Could be a lot worse, could be gnome 3 on release for example, but the floating menu at the top and the installation selection are silly. At least get rid of the latter, just pick a default.

beretguy3• 2 years ago

Do not mess with my Mint. It’s perfectly fine as it is now. No stupid redesign. Don’t try to screw it up.

Edit: before anybody freaks out, pardon me for harsh words, it looks super pretty, but we need less of this impractical “futuristic-looking flat design without borders and too much padding everywhere”.

OnionBlender• 2 years ago

I agree. I've only been using Mint for a few months but I really don't like this redesign either. Everything looks so flat and empty. I think the logo is extremely boring and bland.

I'm not very invested in my installation. I would probably use something else if this was the design instead of having to install a better looking UI.

beretguy3• 2 years ago

Luckily mint offers 3 DE with different looks. Do you could pick a different one.

milankragujevic• 2 years ago

Im sorry but the logo is awful.

mixmastamyk2• 2 years ago

Wow, didn’t like the old logo but this new one is particularly upsetting.

Color is not bad.

Takennickname• 2 years ago

Nice overall. But I hate with all my heart:

Those funky looking people in the stock photos (looksmaxxers).

The new logo. The letter weights is way off. The L looks anemic.

The logo can be saved with few tweaks. Those people in the photos need to go back to the Abercrombie website. (what should you use instead? Tux, obviously.)

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

Yes - the logo does need a little work. Maybe the font is the wrong choice? And the L perhaps needs something. It almost looks as though they're leaving room for another L to make an LLM logo.

I like most of the styling, though.

FinnKuhn• 2 years ago

Looks like something anyone, who uses Linux will hate, but the general public would probably prefer.

zmaznevegor6• 2 years ago

But i use Linux myself :)

BigParm2• 2 years ago

Isn't plasma killing it primarily because of aesthetics? Isn't popOS or whatever popular due to its aesthetics? Elementary OS?

I'll never know if XFCE is any good because it looks like shit.

I don't think that Linux users generally have a fondness for 1990s UI.

soupbowl• 2 years ago

Looks pretty good, logo needs some work though. My parents love Linux mint so please keep up the good work!

nilslindemann• 2 years ago

Is the current dark layout with papyrus icons (or how they are called) not looking great?

diego_sandoval• 2 years ago

I like the fact that you're proposing a visual update to a Linux distro. We need more "visual" people in this sphere, and more attention to aesthetics.

I like the general style you're aiming for. Though I'm worried that the green could be a little bit too intense for UI elements. Current accent color options on Mint are softer colors.

I don't like the logo. The lower square containing the L has waaay too much empty space in it, and the empty space is all concentrated on the superior-right side of the square, making it look very unbalanced. On the other hand, the square containing the M has little padding. These two things combined make the logo look unbalanced at two levels: one square with a lot of empty space vs one square with barely any empty space; the left square has all the empty space on one side of it.

Icons look great. However, what's going to happen when some application has an icon that doesn't adjust to your expectations of style and shape? Will it look good, or will it look very out of place? Mint's current answer to this is "we'll just make our own icons for every app", which I don't think is the right way to do it, for many reasons.

zmaznevegor6• 2 years ago

Huge thanks for the great feed back, really appreciate it.

Regarding the UI colours and icons - we wanted to show overall how the brand creates a visual foundation for the rest of the syste. This is something that is a standard in other fields ofc, but due to the lack of designers (and especially non-technical ones) in oss, this step is often gets missed. Therefore, the whole concept basically tries to show why current visual brand limits the whole system. This being said, both UI and icons are non-final and are mainly for presentation purposes.

For the icon matter the best thing would be to: - introduce some basic guides that can be easily followed by community and app developers - create an icon basis (like first 100 icons for the default icon pack) - introduce some automatic icon switch. For some icons these guides can be applied automatically with adjusted padding and sizing.

Regarding the logo we always need to think of: - how dynamic we want it to be - context defined

I noticed that frequent criticism so far was about logo either feeling imbalanced or being too simple. First of all it is not imbalanced technically, but it is indeed built this way that creates stronger visual dynamic than something more standard like git logo. Coming back to logo simplicity - we need this for a higher brand versatility, at the same time keeping it efficient. The more complicated the logo, the more time it would take to adapt it to various contexts (and sometimes the higher skill it requires). For community-maintained system having a complicated logo would make no sense cause it would just create hours and hours of extra work and design blockers in the future.

randomcatuser• 2 years ago

Awesome work! I hope more design happens for Linux ;) designing the user experience and integrations seems like a key part of making it feel like a consumer desktop!

n_ary• 2 years ago

Kudos! It actually looks great and polished. Also, an ubiquitous UI mimicking the MacOSX aesthetics and usage of larger padding actually is nice due to the new high resolution monitors we see everywhere these days.

The stock people photos are a bit odd, I never saw anyone have photos open on their desktop/laptop ever.

That being said, very nice and clean design.

Also, I would say ignore all the naysayers here, the fetishising of the complex sharp and dense UI is a nostalgic reaction common among hardcore tech people who would love to live in the terminal, but alienates the other 99% population of the globe would prefer a clean ui and access to their applications with nice icons. There is a reason why all OSS suffer from extremely bad UI/UX, because what ordinary people like(simple and clean UI with nice icons and descriptive texts) is immensely different from what tech people like(mostly 200+ magic keyboard shortcuts and arcane ways of starting apps from mysterious console).

zmaznevegor6• 2 years ago

Many thanks for your support. When we were preparing this, I was ready to get a lot of hate as Linux community is overly technicall and visually they don't really like change that much. That's why hearing support is very much appreciated by me and my team.

The reason why it looks sort of like Mac is:

- Sans fonts. But we wanted to keep fonts open-source, simple and versatile, so it can be easily used in different context and wouldn't require overcomplicated guidelines. Therefore, primary + secondary font structure is less efficient in this case due to a more complicated hierarchy maintenance in the future

- Simple logo. Same reason as the fonts - the more complicated it is, the harder it will be in maintenance and the more design resource it would require. I mean even current LM materials has 12 variations of the logo and it's a mess.

Stock people - I mean there are just two, if I don't count the login screen. The first one (with a logo on the back of a long sleeve) is there to show that logo can be used for the physical items as well. The second one in the interface is there to mainly show a profile UI but I think we should have went with a default icon (if the user keeps it blank) instead.

And you are totally right about how hard it is to push for the design solutions in OSS. We started this initiative in June LAST YEAR but soon found out that many people don't understand the whole reason for a brand redesign and don't see how brand creates a visual foundation. So then after some time, we decided that we need to create a brand concept to show specifically how brand creates a visual system, so it would be clear for the community and the devs why you can't start just with the website updates or UI/UX detached from the rest.

And indeed most of the negative feedback right now can be grouped into unwilling to change or tech people preferences.

When we think of Linux Mint though, in it's core it is about being more user-centric and friendly than other Linux distros. This also means that you need to be very beginner friendly - that's why Cinnamon is so Window-like in the first place. Both of these things mean that from a visual standpoint it can't allow itself to be technical and shouldn't follow aesthetics preferred by most of the tech crowd (and I mean why if we have Arch, Manjaro, Debian, etc. for really advanced users who don't care about the GUI). It also means that it needs to be willing to change cause users preferences grow, interface assumptions slowly change with our devices and products we use. And it should be simple for the easy maintenance (but I talked about this one already).

singhrac• 2 years ago

I like it ok, but there is actually a lot of white space (I think current Linux desktops suffer from this quite a bit, though I haven't used one regularly in >8 years).

For example, under "Fresh OS interface", the start menu has lots of extra whitespace around the dividing bar - I think this is a central issue I see repeated everywhere. It looks aesthetically pleasing at first but that space is always dead (is it clickable? I have no idea!). I would encourage you to make it more obvious what the "touch" zones are in the menu, and to maximize them as much as possible. For example on the right side of the menu there shouldn't be any space that isn't clickable.

Also, for power users (i.e. Mint) the search bar should be bigger. Even on Windows where it's barely usable because of random Bing and index stuff the search bar is full width on the menu.

The "Type here to search" text is too low contrast. My parents would not be able to read that. Similarly, in your screenshots, you should use a boldface font for the terminal text. On my QHD monitor it is difficult to read.

There is a desire in Linux desktop enviroments to wrap individual apps in a colored box associated with the app (e.g. Obsidian in light purple, Firefox in dark purple, etc.). I think this is ok but you should consider just using a single block of color like in the Windows taskbar.

NayamAmarshe• 2 years ago

This is absolutely stunning!

but I don’t think it’d ever be implemented. Old projects like Linux Mint are not very comfortable with the idea of looking more modern and sleek.

You’d have a better chance with a new design for ZorinOS but I don’t know if that’s needed since it’s already so modern.

dizhn• 2 years ago

Opensuse is in the first stages of disassociating from the Suse trademarked name and logo. They'd benefit from something like this enormously.

simonblack• 2 years ago

Yurk! Sorry, I don't like the Logo at all!

I thought the redesign was to do with the STRUCTURE of Linux Mint, not a piddly logo change.

And the central menu isn't as worker-friendly when you have a screen-full of stuff already on there.

And what's with the predilection for the panel at the BOTTOM of the screen. We are always working downwards on the screen. Therefore it's more useful to put the panel at the TOP of the screen and out of your way. Just because MSFT and Apple put their panels at the bottom of the screen is no reason not to think carefully about panel placement.

mixmastamyk2• 2 years ago

Yeah, been moving my panels to the top since… Windows 95? (With a brief period on the left when I had a 16:9 screen.)

Was used to the Mac menu up there, and never accepted having to go to the bottom where nothing else is.

SeasonalEnnui• 2 years ago

One of the first things I do with a fresh install of an OS is to enable window titles on taskbar icons & disable any grouping feature. Icons-only cause a cognitive hiccup as I try to work out what it means, and extra clicks from grouping is inefficient. Why is the icon dock so popular with designers?

beretguy3• 2 years ago

Same! I can’t understand anything with just icons. I want 1 icon with text per open windows.

Why is the icon dock so popular with designers?

Maybe because they don’t actually use computers on daily basis to get the job done but just design how they look?

hulitu• 2 years ago

White on light green and light green on white. I guess some people never learn.

Endy• 2 years ago

Please don't break Mint's UI/UX. It's the only one that works like Windows.

BigParm2• 2 years ago

It looks incredible I love it.

But don't those aesthetics belong to the desktop environment as opposed to the distro? I must misunderstand something somewhere.

solarkraft• 2 years ago

From another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41008648):

It almost looks as though they're leaving room for another L to make an LLM logo.

How fitting considering that the text reads like it was randomly generated.

majewsky• 2 years ago

The first image on this site looks literally like a key visual for an Apple products: a swarm of rounded square icons with relatively flat colors and a centered heading in an I-can't-believe-it's-not-Helvetica font. This is the weakest image out of the entire bunch in terms of brand recognizability, so I find it weird that you're leading with it. I hope that this should be relatively easy to fix, since it just needs a font that does not scream "Apple Corp".

Also, I'm confused by your assertions about the logo: You're saying that the intention of the new logo is "simplify the design to increase versatility, improve readability of the initials, refine the colors [and] give a more modern look".

The last two ones are obviously subjective: I'm not a Mint user, so I don't really have a stake in their existing design, but looking at their existing website side-by-side with your proposal artwork, I don't think any of these strongly reads as "more modern" than the other.

Regarding the other two more objective goals, it would be nice to see examples of situations where the old logo is less versatile or less readable.

peter-m80• 2 years ago

Yet another MacOS clone? No, thanks.

I use mint because cinnamon.

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