Adapt Papirus to KDE Plasma 6

[lhy7889678]

A message from maintainers:

• This issue collects all known issues and bugs regarding the transition from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6!

• Before reporting a new problem or bug, please check if the problem is still present when using the latest Papirus git master (use install script in our root directory, see project README)

• For useful background regarding new symbolic icons in plasma 6, see Plasma 6 applets use system icons so missing many icons for applet #3595

• Please understand that Papirus icon theme had already included symbolic icons prior to the Plasma 6 release and those icons now show up in plasma as unthemeable (either dark grey or white, they don't follow the text colour of your colour scheme). You need to use Papirus-Dark for these icons to appear white.

• Please report such icons, but acknowledge that this is something that can only be fixed with some restructuring within Papirus, possibly even splitting the theme in two (KDE and GTK editions).

FAQ

Q: I use Plasma and have Breeze-Dark theme applied. Symbolic Papirus icons are white, but sometimes an icon stands out because it is dark grey. How to make solve this issue?

A: Apply Papirus-Dark instead of just Papirus. While the majority of symbolic icons will adapt to your text colour, these GNOME symbolic icons will not, because they were not intended to do that by Advaita developers. Manually choosing the Papirus flavour will make them blend in with other icons.

Q: I applied the appropriate Papirus flavour but the problematic icons appear blurry when compared to others. How to solve this?

A: These icons have a fixed size of 16x16 pixels, because that's how the modern GTK apps use icons. Most of our icons have different sizes (16px, 22px, 24px, 32px, etc.) so that they render crisply in all situations. However, these GNOME symbolic icons only render correctly at the context of symbolic icons at 2x scale (16, 32, 64, 128, 256px). If they are on a panel where the icon size is 22px (Plasma panel by default), they will appear blurry. Adjust your icon size to be either 16px or 32px or use margin separator widgets on Plasma panels to separate different icon sizes.

Q: How to resolve this whole mess?

A: Advocate for a unified symbolic icon implementation between GNOME and KDE so that icon themes like Papirus are able to make one icon for every desktop environment and have it not look awful. If one spec-compliant icon theme is in practice incompatible with some desktop environment, what is the purpose of the specification?

Original message:

KDE Plasma 6 seems to have changed the names of some icons used in the system tray / system settings / etc. As a result, these icons will fall back to the default Breeze icon theme, even though Papirus has adequate icons (with different names) for them.

Here is a list of icons that I have noticed so far:

• brightness-high-symbolic, redshift-status-off-symbolic, redshift-status-on-symbolic, redshift-status-day-symbolic: Used in the brightness controller
• klipper-symbolic: Used in the clipboard manager
• notifications-disabled-symbolic, notification-active-symbolic, notification-inactive-symbolic: Used in the notification manager
• kdeconnect-tray-symbolic: Used by KDE Connect

(everything above could also have their counterparts without "-symbolic")

• network-flightmode-on: Used by the network manager
• input-touchscreen: Used by system settings

Note that this is not an exhaustive list. Maybe we can refer to the new Breeze icon theme repository to find what's not included in Papirus.

[Bingo90]

The removable devices tray icon also shows a colored version, not a monochrome version - not sure this is intended

[stengun]

Relevant post from Nate:
https://pointieststick.com/2023/08/12/how-all-this-icon-stuff-is-going-to-work-in-plasma-6/

[d-avery]

I was about to make this same issue! Papirus is my favorite icon pack. Looking forward to using it with Plasma 6!

[monstorix]

Panel related adaptions was once mentioned by #3595.

[archisman-panigrahi]

Plasma 5

Plasma 6 (please ignore the annotation around the battery. Also the power icon changing to Plasma icon is a bug with that applet, it is not a Plasma issue.)

[dmaliog]

I support we are waiting for Plasma 6! Papirus is the best set!

[morganist]

do we make the symbolic klipper icon to be a generic metal clip icon ( ) used for clipman in xfce, for example? or perhaps a better solution would be to draw a new icon that would be more similar to the one breeze icon theme uses? ( )
also, we have a few klipper icons in various old plasma themes. those could be used too.

[morganist]

Okay guys, I don't think it is possible to have a solution right now. KDE colour scheme icons currently only have sizes up to 24px in Papirus, but the ones that were previously used inside the Plasma themes need to have 32px and 22px sizes. There's no place for symbolic 32px icons at the moment. And even after figuring out where to put them, the necessary scripts for preparing and converting the icons need to be modified. I managed to assemble a quick-and-dirty solution, but I think it is better not to merge it. We need restructuring. I guess I can finally understand what @SmartFinn meant by his harsh reaction to this change in Plasma 6.

[morganist]

I could even start adding some necessary 32px symbolic icons myself, perhaps in the apps folder or in a new folder somewhere, but I'm not experienced in the project structure and script writing, so I'll be waiting for Serhii to say his word.