[WIP] Better contrast

[luisrguerra]

Cinnamon's dark theme has little contrast and is very gray (Linux Mint as a whole uses a lot of gray and I've already mentioned this here before), it should be a little darker. In this pull request I changed the black tones to something more like the black theme in Windows 10 and 11. Microsoft paid a lot of designers just to decide which tone of black and white to use, I think it's a good idea to copy and paste of the hex code color.

Current theme:

[mtwebster]

I kind of like it - the color change should be in the _colors.scss file, though, then compiled to update cinnamon-dark.css.

[JosephMcc]

@mtwebster Missed the request for review in my email. I think visually it looks ok except for the fact that darkening the panel and menus has made all the borders disappear. Now everything just seems to die against the background and that doesn't look good, imho. I'm not a fan of how the menu and panel just look like one big block in the screenshot above. I also think the dark color would go best if it matched the dark color of the dark Gtk theme window titlebars and header bars so everything goes together nicely.

You are right though that this was done incorrectly. The sass needs to be updated, not the .css files. The first time a build is done all of these changes would be overwritten by the old ones.

[luisrguerra]

@JosephMcc
In the future, I will try to revise the dark theme color palette in the code when I have time. However, I ask you to please start now to consider revising both the light (which is very gray) and dark themes for the upcoming versions of Linux Mint. The best approach would be to base the color palette on those used by systems such as MacOS, Windows, and ChromeOS. When developing these systems, companies hire multiple people to conduct detailed studies on the aesthetics, usability, and accessibility of the interface and the result is very good. In my opinion, interface developers of Linux desktop environments often tend to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the interface. Unfortunately, the results are usually disappointing and bring very few real innovations. In an analogy to an Olympic race, if the Linux world wants to become a leader in desktop operational systems, it needs to start running from the starting line, not from the back.

[clefebvre]

I've the same opinion as @JosephMcc.

[JosephMcc]

I pretty sure all you'd have to do is set the bg_color in common.scss to match the titlebar/headerbar color from the dark Gtk theme. Everything else probably will follow along without having to do much else.

[clefebvre]

@luisrguerra don't hesitate to join https://matrix.to/#/#linuxmint-artists:matrix.org. We're looking at artwork changes for Mint 22, it'd be good to have a chat about it.