System tray icons don't follow the theme settings?

[hvs]

Finally, I got myself together and updated to 20.1 on a new SSD. I was afraid my cozy mint 18 installation would be ruined, but surprisingly the new system picked up the old settings quite smoothly. Except for one thing: tray icons. I have set up my Mate desktop to use Mint-X theme for everything.

Yet this is how my tray looks like:

2021-01-31-203535_246x45_scrot.png (13.53 KiB) Viewed 7494 times

While the status icons of Mint-X theme look like this:

Clearly, the icons in the tray are not these ones. When I select different themes in the appearance settings, I only get two varieties of tray icons: those above, or their off-white counterparts. Back in mint 18, I had colorful nvidia icon and my battery did turn red on low. Also they scaled better, currently I feel like the icons are a tad higher than they should be. I would really like to bring it back as it was, but I just don't know how. Is it an artifact caused by bringing in mate settings from the previous version? Or is mate in 20.1 working somewhat differently? Because so far it looks like my system has just two tray icon sets.

[ChrisMW]

I have the same problem. Whatever icon theme I select, the XApps status applet does not do colour, except for the network applet, which does change. Rather irritating, as I happen to dislike the grey, stylized icons. It is of course, a personal taste, and I have quite a muted colour theme, so the bright colourful icons are about the only thing that stand out. I know, weird. Running Mint Mate 20.1.

I don't remember this from LMDE 4, then I went to KDE Neon's and I really liked KDE's ability to tweak almost everything. But the NVidia situation went pear shaped, so I needed an Ubuntu based, so I've returned back to Mint, but no longer the LMDE version, mainly for Optimus/NVidia stuff. Read somewhere that QT / KDE are not to be trusted with NVidia, so wanted to go back to MATE, simply because Cinnemon (like the advanced MATE menu), does not do sub menu's, something I really need to keep things tidy.

Anyway, I've restored my mail (had to add a PPA to get the latest, TB didn't like the downgrade), restored the VM's, It's good to be back....

[AndyMH]

Unless someone else knows a better way, it's a case of hunting down those icons in /usr/share/icons and replacing them with the ones from the mint-x theme. At least you know that they are probably in the status folder which narrows the search a bit. I feel the same way about the mint update icon in LM20 - prefer the one in LM19.0, but haven't got round to doing anything about it yet.

[roblm]

I like to change the System Tray icons with more colorful custom icons. However, some manual configuration is needed. The screenshot below is the default appearance:

mate20-system tray.png (15.83 KiB) Viewed 7300 times

This is after changing the network and sound icons, removing the 3 vertical dots and changing the format of the Date & Time display:

mate20 system tray2.png (12.79 KiB) Viewed 7300 times

[ChrisMW]

I would like to know how you did that... Also, I have two notifcation applets, one is called "XApp Status Applet" and it shows network, bluetooth, battery, update, volume etc.. and "Notification Area" where I see minimized apps (such as QuietRSS). It is only the latter that has the 3 dots, so somewhat confused

[roblm]

I would like to know how you did that... Also, I have two notifcation applets, one is called "XApp Status Applet" and it shows network, bluetooth, battery, update, volume etc.. and "Notification Area" where I see minimized apps (such as QuietRSS). It is only the latter that has the 3 dots, so somewhat confused

This info is for changing the sound and network icons for the Mint-X theme. First use this command to copy the /usr/share/icons/Mint-X folder to the .icons folder in Home:
cp -R /usr/share/icons/Mint-X ~/.icons

Now the Mint-X folder can be edited without needing root authority.

To change the sound icon, open the .icons folder and go to /Mint-X/status/scalable. Right click on audio-volume-high-symbolic.svg and select Rename. Add xxx to the end to disable it.
The icon you will use for replacement should be renamed audio-volume-high-symbolic.svg and be copied to the same location. Notice that it has the .svg extension. If the icon has a .png extension, then it should be opened in Inkscape and saved as an .svg file. You will need to install Inkscape first. There is no specific size requirement. My icon is 278x278 pixels.

The sound icon will change back to the default icon if the volume goes below 67%. To prevent that, rename the audio-volume-medium-symbolic.svg and audio-volume-low-symbolic.svg icons and replace them with the same icon used for audio-volume-high-symbolic.svg.

To change the network icon go to /Mint-X/status/24 and rename the
network-transmit-receive.png icon. Repeat the steps used for the sound icon. Repeat these steps in the /Mint-X/status/32 folder. The custom icon will display correctly for panel sizes 27 through 34.

For info on how to remove the 3 vertical dots, go here, under the section:
Update for Mint 19.2 MATE > Panel item border appearance:
viewtopic.php?p=964552#p964552

[ChrisMW]

Aah, I tried switching, but I need to fix the Mint-X set. Will have a go, thnx.....

[ChrisMW]

For some weird reason, it doesn't work. It is picking up icons from somewhere, they seem the scalable ones, but even after taking the theme local and colouring in some status icons, the pickup is odd. The battery icon didn't alter at all, but the bluetooth icon changed partially. It is odd, on my LMDE laptop I simply selected an icon theme and it worked. If I select the same theme on Mint 20.1, nothing changes. It is almost like there is something decolourizing the icons. It should not be so hard to alter some icons.... I need the ubuntu base for a reason, otherwise I'd simply go with LMDE,

[interestingnum1]

I tried replacing the icons in my ~/.icons folder and it did not work. Maybe this only affects upgrades, not fresh installs?

[roblm]

I tried replacing the icons in my ~/.icons folder and it did not work. Maybe this only affects upgrades, not fresh installs?

I had tested the method by running a live session using a MATE 20.1 installation USB but I just finished testing on an actual installation and I got the same result. However, I noticed that the first time I used the command
cp -R /usr/share/icons/Mint-X ~/.icons, only the contents of the Mint-X folder were copied to the .icons folder and not the Mint-X part. I deleted the contents in .icons and ran the command again and it worked correctly. When you open the .icons folder, you should see Mint-X.

Also the default position of the Sound icon volume slider is below 67%, so it needs to be increased before the replacement icon will be visible.

[ChrisMW]

I copied the theme I've selected and recoloured the icons, the weird thing is, for the volume, it changed 3 of the 4 icons, although I recoloured all 4. It seems to have an effect on all but the volume off icon, it is probably using a different one. The status you see on the desktop has fully altered. However, recolouring the battery and blue tooth had no effect. And I don't get it, as the theme's non-scalable ones are very different in appearance. It must be pulling the icons using other names than I was thinking, but have not been able to find what name is. Barring snooping in source code, I have not found a way. I don't like the bunch of boring grey ones I know see that the top, but have given up in frustration. If anyone can recommend a theme that does deliver nice colourful icons in the notification area let know, I can download those and copy them over into the ~/.icons folder.... Back to wondering why this is so hard.....

[roblm]

It seems to have an effect on all but the volume off icon, it is probably using a different one.

The icon used for volume off is: /Mint-X/status/scalable/audio-volume-muted-symbolic.svg

For some unfathomable reason, the icon used for no network connection is:
/usr/share/icons/Adwaita/scalable/status/network-wireless-offline-symbolic.svg

Here are the icons I use for sound muted and no network connection, which makes the current status very obvious:

mate system tray.png (6.17 KiB) Viewed 6593 times

I’ve been successfully replacing the default icons in MATE and Cinnamon since Mint 17. The only hard part is finding their locations, and the developers frequently like to change that.

It may be better to replace icons in two steps. You will know if the correct icon is being replaced. After it is renamed, a black icon containing a red circle with a slash in it will be seen. Log out and back for any change to take effect.

mate system tray-2.png (5.36 KiB) Viewed 6593 times

[ChrisMW]

it is not taking the icon you mention with me, and it is not taking the icon from my icon set I set. The name of the icon is the same. It seems to be taking the icons, but not always the colour. So for audio, the speaker is just white, the right shape, but the grey lines have gone. The volume is coloured, but when muted, what is a red cross in the SVG, is a white cross in the notification area. The Miint-X icon looks very different, so it's not that. The status dialog you get when you press the volume up/down, is completely what I expect it to be. I will see if I can post some screen shots. It is almost as if the notification area is reducing colour depth. I coloured the battery icons, nope, just black and white. it is weird. The network icons however, are properly coloured and do come from the theme. So there's something going on, I can't work it out and am left with ugly and bland status icons. I also know it's not one of the fixed size icons, because I deliberately have those shaped differently. I know you can splatter icons in 3 locations, ~/.icons, ~/.local/share/icons and /usr/share/icons, there might be more. What;s even worse, themes may be incomplete and inherit from others. And to top it off, there's no way of telling what icon is being picked up by certain programs, making this quite hard. Perhaps MATE should have a icon theme maker, that can show me, given a set, what icons end up where. Perhaps there is, but from someone whose life is not focussed on icons, but just wants some bland stuff to be colourful, it is quite an hostile process. And I can't remember this being a problem before, I usually know my way around Mint, but this one has me beat.

[Kudalufi]

it is not taking the icon you mention with me ... this one has me beat.

There is something badly wrong with the tray icons in Mint 20. When I upgraded from 19.3 to 20 I was also disgusted at the terrible icons.

This was, unfortunately, intentional. From Mint's "new features" description for version 20:

In all editions (Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce) many of the tray icons were harmonized, given symbolic icons and HiDPI support.

They then go on to call it a "better looking system tray"

I really don't know how exactly they did it, but inherent in how they "harmonized" between Mate, Cinnamon, and XFCE, it now does something unholy to ignore user choices and settings across the board. Someone wanted to harmonize all the versions and instead of doing the work to make a proper (and changeable) theme for each window manager, they put in a hack somewhere that did it all at once.

It's just awful. Unfortunately, tray icons is not the hill anyone really wants to die on, and while the majority of people hate them, no one has raised enough of a stink for Mint to revert the change.

...it is quite an hostile process...

It is. It totally is. It actually kind of reminds me of pre-user-abandonment Firefox ten years ago when they started making UI changes that literally nobody wanted on back-to-back-to-back releases and then told anyone who commented on it to just live with it. We all know how that turned out.

[ChrisMW]

I'm fine with a release wanting to style things a certain way, but MATE has icon themes and they are exist for a reason. The current approach seems to ignore the fact I should be able to set them to my liking, not the people who come up with a new version. Or are we going down the route of what you see in other operating systems? What's next, mandated backgrounds, colour schemes. As my grandad would say 'give over'. My taskbar is currently ugly, very ugly, and boring. And whatever has been done seems to have affected the autohide. Because I have two panels, one keeps auto hiding, one (with the icons) stops after a couple of hours, or after some program launch. Which means I have had to switch on the hide buttons, which do work. And now I hear XFCE is as bad in this respect. The choice of a desktop is getting increasingly hard with all these restrictions. I tried Cinnamon, nice, but the menu is just too limited. I don't mind XFCE so much, but the unlock screen isn't nice. KDE I liked, except it doesn't do screensavers, and doesn't play nice with nVidia. Perhaps it's just time to move to one that does allow the user to configure it, one that is less well known, where users can actually control things......