Landry Breuil wrote:
Le Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 02:27:41PM +0800, Chris Billington a écrit :
x11/gnome/adwaita-icon-theme contains the Hidden=true attribute in its
index.theme file, for reasons attibutable to the upstream Gnome Project.
This means that Adwaita does not appear as an 'Icon Theme' choice in
non-gnome desktops such as Xfce in the Settings/Appearance dialog.
Non-desktop x11 systems are also affected.
On non-Gnome systems if applications use the Adwaita 'symbolic' icons (for
exmaple) those icons will not appear.
thanks, i have to admit i dont fully understand what it fixes since by
itself it doesnt ship much icons, is that mostly because this
'overloads' adwaita and makes it selectable for the end-user ?
(note: i havent made any testing at all)
I am unsure whether this should be in x11/ or x11/xfce4 category. Advice
please.
it can go in x11/ like x11/greybird, having it in x11/xfce4 would make
sense if it'd benefited from the xfce4.port.mk module or from
x11/xfce4/Makefile.inc. meta/xfce can also depend on it if that makes a
better 'out of the box' user experience for icon themes..
Landry
The monocular logic of Gnome's decision to make the Adwaita icon theme
'private' is documented at
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/merge_requests/71
MR was merged 12 May 2024. The same was done the next day for 'Adwaita
Legacy', which was created to preserve functionality for applications
which don't have the -symbolic' suffix on icon names.
The project description is now "Private UI icon set for GNOME core apps"
and another metadata file with commit message "you're better off not
using it" states: "Adwaita icon theme provides basic icon assets for
some core components of the GNOME OS, mainly Settings, Files and
gnome-shell. The assets are not meant for apps. See the icon development
kit for reusable icon assets."
Unfortunately, other GTK applications use common symbolic icon names
present in Adwaita. Unless another icon theme that includes them (many
don't) is installed and selected, they won't appear.
The current situation in Xfce is that (in the 'Appearance' GUI app),
it's possible to select Adwaita as the gui theme, but the matching icon
theme doesn't appear, though it can be activated by editing GTK settings
files. This is confusing for new users.
Making this 'wrapper' icon theme port x11/adwaita-xfce-icon-theme
available would resolve that situation and adds a few xfce-specific
icons, which is arguably lower-friction than patching out 'Hidden=true'
from the adawaita-icon-theme and adwaita-icon-theme-legacy ports. If
installed, it can be used in other FDO-compliant DE's too, also in WM
settings files.
Chris
