| Summary: | Hide "Breeze Dark" icon theme and secretly apply it automatically based on darkness of active Breeze theme's background color | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Applications] systemsettings | Reporter: | Tamás Králl <tamaskrall42> |
| Component: | kcm_icons | Assignee: | Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs> |
| Status: | CONFIRMED --- | ||
| Severity: | wishlist | CC: | 4wy78uwh, nate |
| Priority: | NOR | Keywords: | usability |
| Version First Reported In: | master | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Platform: | Neon | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: | ||
| Sentry Crash Report: | |||
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Description
Tamás Králl
2024-12-26 16:07:45 UTC
The Breeze Dark icon theme is somewhat of a compatibility tool. You see, both icon themes contain icons capable of changing their colors dynamically in KDE apps that use our icon loading system. However not all apps use this icon loading system — for example, GNOME apps. In such apps, it's important that the icons' base color be legible because it won't be re-colored. Breeze Dark provides light-colored icons for this purpose. I'm not sure how we could present this in the UI. Any ideas? If I understand correctly, the Breeze Dark icons are there to be used in case the user has a GNOME app with a dark GTK theme. Using the default Breeze icons would make them look illegible so the user can change it to the Breeze Dark icon theme to solve this issue. And the Breeze Dark Global Theme will make GNOME apps dark (does this need an xdg-portal?) , so it needs the compatibility, that's why the Breeze Dark Icon Theme is selected. This wasn't clear to me before, so maybe it could be explained somewhere in the UI with a hint or something. Ideally, the compatibility problem wouldn't exist, but I assume there is a reason why it does. > maybe it could be explained somewhere in the UI with a hint or something Where and how? It's kind of a lot to explain. > Ideally, the compatibility problem wouldn't exist, but I assume there is a reason why it does. There is: no cross-desktop standard exists for symbolic icon re-coloring. Thus, we do it one way, and GNOME does it another way. So our icons don't re-color with their icon loader, and their icons don't re-color with our icon loader. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/1762 and https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/default-icon-theme/-/issues/24 and https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/132#note_2397516 Perhaps if in the Icon Theme previews the difference between the two themes were more apparent. Right they look identical. Or am I missing something? Do the two themes behave exactly the same way in KDE apps and only differ in GNOME and other semi-supported apps? > Do the two themes behave exactly the same way in KDE apps and only differ in GNOME and other semi-supported apps?
That's exactly right.
Would it be possible to automatically switch to the dark mode icons based on the GTK theme? So we would only have one icon theme: Breeze. And when the system calculates that the GTK theme needs the dark mode icons (the lighter ones), it selects those in the background. This means there wouldn't be a need to communicate to the user why there are two seemingly identical icon themes available by default. Or are these icons used anywhere outside of KDE and GTK apps? That's not a bad idea. We would need to examine the colors in the GTK theme to make sure the background color was dark enough to benefit from swapping out Breeze for Breeze Dark. But I think it's feasible. |