We look at how to change the background using the Appearance Preferences dialog box Background tab.

We start by looking at how change the background to the other background pictures included with Linux Mint.

Then we look at setting a background color using the Pick a Color dialog box and the different ways we can change the background color with that.

We see to change the background color, we must have the proper background selected, the upper left corner background titled "No Desktop Background"

We see how the eyedropper works by clicking the eyedropper and then clicking on any color on the desktop to set the background to that color.

We add in some background pictures (that get added in in alphabetical order). And look at the different styles:

TILE - Repeats the picture over and over like tiles next to one another.
CENTER - Places the picture in the center of the desktop at in its original size ( We can also change the background color)
STRETCH - Stretches (distorts) the picture to fit the entire picture to cover the entire screen
SCALE - Fits the picture to the screen as large as it can and still show the entire picture at scale
ZOOM - Zoom will scale the picture, until the picture covers the entire desktop, some of picture maybe be outside the desktop and will not be seen.
SPAN - Will stretch a single picture across 2 monitorship

We look at how to change the Font on the Linux Mint Mate desktop.

We start out looking at the Fonts in the Appearance Preference window.

There are 5 different font groups that can be changed in that window.

APPLICATION FONT: Changes the font for tabs, the task bar, the menu, and windows like the Appearance Preferences window and Update Manager.

DOCUMENT FONT: This font appears not to work, but that is because documents like LibreOffice Writer use their own font and override the default document font.

DESKTOP FONT: This changes the font for the text on the desktop only.

WINDOW TITLE FONT: Changes the font on the window title bar.

FIXED WIDTH FONT: This sets the font for programs like the Text Editor program (Pluma) and the Terminal.

To increase the size of all fonts you may consider increasing the number in the Resolution Dots per inch (under Details)

After looking at the Font tab in the Appearance Preference window, we look at adding fonts using the software manager and adding in a custom font from a free font website.

We look at the Theme tab of the Appearance Preference window.

We first look a selecting a new theme and see how it effects the Update Manager window, the File Manager Window, and the Desktop.

We open the Customize Theme window and change the Controls, the Pointer, and the Icons - Then save that as a new theme.

We change the Window Border and see this control also changes the appearance of the title bar.

The Customize Theme Colors tab allows us to change the Tooltip, the Selected items, the Input Box, and the Windows. Which we change to an outrageous theme.

We save the new outrageous theme with the same name as before and see we need to close and re-open the Appearance Preference window, before we can use the updated theme.

We end the video by downloading the mate-themes from the software manager and take a look at two favorite themes - GreenLaguna and Black-Mate.

In this video we look at the Desktop Settings.

We see how to show or hide the Computer, Home, Trash, Network, and Mounted Volumes icons on the Desktop

We talk about how to use the Trash can folder and that we want to keep all our documents somewhere in our home folder.

We see how to show and hide icons on menus and how to turn on the text and icons on buttons or just show the icons (or just the text) on the buttons.

We see how to turn on and off the fortune cookies and what it does in the Terminal

The titlebar font from the Appearance Preference window can be over-ridden by checking the Use System Font in Titlebar from the Desktop settings

We also see how to change the buttons in the title bar from traditional style (on the right) to Mac style(on the left) and look at how that would look with the GreenLaguna theme.

The "Don't show window content while dragging" was not captured by my screen recorder, but it is explained in this video.