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[Approved] Plasma 6 proposal: remove the concept of icons in the Plasma theme

Once upon a time, this was implemented so that System Tray icons and other icons on the panel could be monochrome. This looked better than putting a jumble of colorful icons on the panel, and still looks better today.

However, it causes a lot of subtle edge-case issues and user confusion, because now there are two sources of icons, and the rules for which source gets used where are unclear and unpredictable. Everything mostly works when using the Breeze icon theme and Breeze Plasma theme, but anytime you switch one or both of those to a theme that doesn't match with the other, all kinds of subtle icon source bugs crop up and your panel looks weird in random-seeming ways. See all the bugs in the "See also" list of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438191

I'd like to propose for Plasma 6 that we remove the concept of icons in Plasma themes; instead, icons would always come from the icon theme for simplicity and comprehensibility.

Relatedly:

To facilitate the legitimate design goal to have monochrome app and plasmoid icons on the panel and not-always-monochrome icons elsewhere in the icon theme (see https://phabricator.kde.org/T10413), we have now settled on using the -symbolic suffix for monochrome icons in Plasma 6 and beyond. We now need to do the following:

  • In all KDE software, every time we ask for an icon we want to never be colorful, ask for the icon name with -symbolic appended
  • Rename all of our monochrome Breeze icons to end with -symbolic

(These changes can be done over time and are not mandatory)

Merge requests implementing this change:

To test those merge requests, use the Breeze icon theme and a non-default Plasma theme that includes some of its own icons (e.g. Adapta, Layan, Materia) and look for non-Breeze icons in widgets. There shouldn't be any. Then change your icon theme to something other than Breeze. You should see that the new icons from the icon theme apply to Plasma things too now.

Edited by Nate Graham