Differences between Mint themes?

[CJRoss]

In the settings, I have an option between Mint-L, Mint-X, and Mint-Y but I can't seem to find any place that explains what these themes are or what the differences are. Is there a way to easily tell what each is for and what changes between them?

[xenopeek]

Themes configure how your windows, menus, controls and icons look. They aren't "for" anything except for you, if you want, to try and decide which you like the looks of best. When you change the style it immediately applies so you can try it out easily. Switch to a different style then look in your menu, look in a file manager window and so on - do you like the way it looks better than with a different style? If so stick with it.

Mint-Y is the default and is the newest style.

[CJRoss]

I know what a theme is. But there didn't particularly seem to be much of a difference between then except for some of them disabling dark mode, etc. That's why I was wondering what the differences and intent were.

[PaulL]

I've learned that one thing they do is to change the color of the folder icons in Nemo. Another thing they do is to set the icons used in various places. There are also themes for different cursor styles.

[Beerislife]

I think Mint-X is the oldest of the theme sets and gives a more curved/rounded feel to windows.

Mint-L is the previous theme set, which is basically flat and has smaller control buttons than the current Mint-Y.

Best thing is to try them all and see what you like.

Some themes contain both a Cinnamon desktop theme and a GTK theme for the look of app windows.

You can also get new Cinnamon and GTK themes from here:

https://www.cinnamon-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest

[mint-user-2018]

A theme is a collection of settings for text colour and and background of window title bars, menus and panels; and also icons, font sizes, decoration sizes and default background, aka look and feel.

Your can diff the directories of the artifacts --
/usr/share/icons/Mint-X
/usr/share/themes/Mint-X

You will find some icons are missing from some themes. I prefer to use a theme with a more complete set. If you find some icons missing, you can notify the maintainer of the package. You can also see the theme contents in synaptic package manager, choose search 'mint-x' (L, Y or other), select, right click, properties, (tab) installed files. You can also copy these to files or buffers and diff them.

If you are in themes application (settings) you can choose the tab add/remove to preview thumbnails of a screenshot to see the differences.