Icons in Plasma 6 are dark-on-dark

[ilya-fedin]

• Distribution (version): NixOS unstable
• Desktop environment: KDE
• Installing method: nixpkgs

The icons turned into dark-on-dark since Plasma 6 release. I waited assuming it all will iron out with time but only part of them got fixed. Right now, I see that the show desktop button, the arrows in classic menu and Wayland to X11 bridge in tray are broken. There's likely more I don't see with my workflow.

[morganist]

please read the pinned issue about Plasma 6.

[ilya-fedin]

The list of the icons in the pinned issue seem to not to have icons related to show desktop/the arrow/xwaylandvideobridge. I assume it doesn't cover my case? My theme is a light one (just the panels are dark) so the suggestion to apply Papirus Dark doesn't apply in my case, too.

[morganist]

your problem is described at the top of the first message , please read it carefully. tldr: use Papirus-Dark specifically if you use a dark theme

[ilya-fedin]

But I don't use a dark theme as I already said

[ilya-fedin]

The pinned issue doesn't also really explain why only some icons are dark. It says something about GNOME/Adwaita but it's not clear how that is related.

[morganist]

I see, you use a dark panel with light application colour scheme. These gray icons are not themeable in that scenario. As for the explanation, it's all in #3663

[morganist]

In case it's a bit hard to understand, here's bit of history:
GNOME introduces symbolic icons a couple of years ago in Adwaita icon theme. They were used in new libadwaita application. The main difference is that they have -symbolic appended at the end of their name. Only libadwaita applications can apply colour themes to these icons, as the icon contains no imbedded styles itself. In Papirus, these icons were added in order for Papirus icons to appear in modern GNOME apps.
Plasma 6 released a year ago, with Breeze icon theme now containing some symbolic icons. Except they weren't like GNOME ones at all – just KDE recolourable icons like they were before, but with -symbolic suffix to distinguish them from colorful icons. They still haven't finished the transition, if I understand correctly.
What's the problem? Well, sometimes a new symbolic icon from Breeze icon theme uses the same name for as an already existing Adwaita symbolic icon. We already have the GNOME icon, so we can't add another.

[ilya-fedin]

What's the problem to make them compatible with both GNOME and KDE? As far as I understand, GNOME will recolor them no matter what so you can just add the KColorScheme classes to elements and they will be re-colored by both GNOME and KDE. Right?

Another thing not clear is why some icons are fine to be made re-colored by KDE while others are not, what's the criteria?

[morganist]

Another thing not clear is why some icons are fine to be made re-colored by KDE while others are not, what's the criteria?

As I've said – they were made earlier for GNOME specification. They weren't used anywhere but in libadwaita applications back then. We know it's a mess but we don't want to just drop support for these icons, somebody needs to remake them completely.

[ilya-fedin]

Ahhhh. Why is there no list of such icons unlike for non-present ones?