Introducing CinnaMX: An unofficial MX Linux community respin

[Joseph DeGarmo]

Looks good. How are the MX tools theme behaving in Cinnamon? We tried to fix stuff for Plasma, added a bunch of launchers for the MX tools that make them preserve the environment needed to preserve the user theming. Hopefully that will help in Cinnamon too, and possibly other DEs but I haven't tested.

The MX tools generally work, though there were a few, such as MX Menu Editor, Select Sound, and Compton Manager, which cater to XFCE and are pointless, so those were blocked from Cinnamon. That stuff can be done in the same manner as in Linux Mint. They still carry on the XFCE theming, though, but it would probably be a lot of work to make them respect the Cinnamon theme. I already ran into issues trying to switch LightDM to slick-greeter in order to get some options, such as NumLockX, to work, so I'm not going to go that far just yet.

[fehlix]

Hello, guys. I'm a new member here. I have been using MX Linux off and on for the last two years and I think that this is a great distro. I've also been using other distros, including Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Garuda Linux, and a couple of Ubuntu flavors. Thanks for accepting me as a member.

I have been seeing the community release a few respins of MX Linux and I figured that I could create one of my own. This one is called CinnaMX, an MX respin featuring the Cinnamon desktop environment. This is a custom build of MX Linux 21.1 AHS XFCE with the Cinnamon desktop added. It features a customized desktop layout with a dock and utilizes the Mint themes and icons. The desktop background was created by myself using a non-licensed HiDPI image.

Looks good. Seems QT theming looks a bit pale, so most MX-apps do no follow theming.
Eg: like this:

mxpi-cinnamx-missing-qtenv.png

I guess QT-environment variable didn't made it to get set
normally in Xfce through this guy: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/56xfce4-qtconfig
So, if those here set somehow during login:

Code: Select all

export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
export QT_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
export QT_PLATFORM_PLUGIN=gtk2

MX tools and other QT apps, would follow theme,
as shown here: MX Tools:

mc-tools-cinnamx.png

MXPI:

mxpi-cinnamx.png

+++EDIT+++:
Removed above those two as they are not theme related,
export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1
export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
IIRC, they have been set to fix some xfce related "issue".

[AVLinux]

@fehlix

If qt5ct is being used for QT themes then an alternate answer is to place the qt5ct configuration folder in /root, just mentioning in case it is relevant..

[Joseph DeGarmo]

Hello, guys. I'm a new member here. I have been using MX Linux off and on for the last two years and I think that this is a great distro. I've also been using other distros, including Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Garuda Linux, and a couple of Ubuntu flavors. Thanks for accepting me as a member.

I have been seeing the community release a few respins of MX Linux and I figured that I could create one of my own. This one is called CinnaMX, an MX respin featuring the Cinnamon desktop environment. This is a custom build of MX Linux 21.1 AHS XFCE with the Cinnamon desktop added. It features a customized desktop layout with a dock and utilizes the Mint themes and icons. The desktop background was created by myself using a non-licensed HiDPI image.

Looks good. Seems QT theming looks a bit pale, so most MX-apps do no follow theming.
Eg: like this:mxpi-cinnamx-missing-qtenv.png
I guess QT-environment variable didn't made it to get set
normally in Xfce through this guy: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/56xfce4-qtconfig
So, if those here set somehow during login:

Code: Select all

export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
export QT_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
export QT_PLATFORM_PLUGIN=gtk2
export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1

MX tools and other QT apps, would follow theme,
as shown here: MX Tools:mc-tools-cinnamx.png
MXPI:mxpi-cinnamx.png

Nice. Thank you.

[jeffreyC]

One thing I find odd with this is that you use several current Linux Mint apps but do not use the current Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 version of Cinnamon which is 5.2.7 but rather the older version from Debian, LMDE 5 is based on Debian Bullseye just as MX 21 is.

[Joseph DeGarmo]

One thing I find odd with this is that you use several current Linux Mint apps but do not use the current Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 version of Cinnamon which is 5.2.7 but rather the older version from Debian, LMDE 5 is based on Debian Bullseye just as MX 21 is.

Cinnamon is Linux Mint's homebrew product. LMDE 5 was released several months later than Debian 11 and the Mint team builds their latest Cinnamon version into their newest point releases. KDE Neon is pretty much the same way with KDE Plasma, except that they use rolling updates for their desktop.

[Joseph DeGarmo]

I'm running into a major issue where the desktop theme and settings are not being carried over to a new user. How do I fix this?

[Adrian]

I'm running into a major issue where the desktop theme and settings are not being carried over to a new user. How do I fix this?

New user files are instantiated from /etc/skel, so when you set a theme, you need to copy the relevant stuff to /etc/skel and that will be copied to the new user.

[Joseph DeGarmo]

I'm running into a major issue where the desktop theme and settings are not being carried over to a new user. How do I fix this?

New user files are instantiated from /etc/skel, so when you set a theme, you need to copy the relevant stuff to /etc/skel and that will be copied to the new user.

Done, but for whatever reason, Nemo does not automatically generate new entries for the new user's Documents, Pictures, Downloads, etc.

[AVLinux]

I'm running into a major issue where the desktop theme and settings are not being carried over to a new user. How do I fix this?

New user files are instantiated from /etc/skel, so when you set a theme, you need to copy the relevant stuff to /etc/skel and that will be copied to the new user.

Done, but for whatever reason, Nemo does not automatically generate new entries for the new user's Documents, Pictures, Downloads, etc.

Hi, if you are using MX-Snapshot in my experience you don't want to have the files: ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs and ~/.config/user-dirs.locale in /etc/skel/.config... It seems if they are present the usual XDG User Directory set is not created, but if they are not in /etc/skel/.config these directories will be created, it seems counter-intuitive but I think most likely 'xdg-user-dirs-update' wants to run when a new User is created but if it sees that it's config files are already present then it doesn't create the User Directories.. *Note this was my experience with XFCE4 anyway, Cinnamon may be different..

@Adrian or @dolphin_oracle will know much better what the particulars of this are..