Description: BRING SOME COLOR INTO YOUR PLASMA ≥ 4.5.0 SYSTEM TRAY!
LICENSING:
All the icons except amarok.svgz are oxygen icons, drawn by the Oxygen Team, license: see Oxygen-COPYING.txt
amarok.svgz license: see Amarok-icon-COPYING.txt
All files modified by Kevin Kofler to satisfy the technical requirements (object labeling) for Plasma system tray icon themes, Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Kevin Kofler.
I tried hard not to make any artistic changes to the Oxygen artwork, but still, if something looks bad, it’s probably my fault. ;-) I’m a developer, not an artist, and I do not use Inkscape regularly.
INSTALLATION:
Copy the icons to ~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/‹yourtheme›/icons where ‹yourtheme› is the folder name of the Plasma theme you are using (default for the default Air theme). No other files should be needed.
NOTE ABOUT NOTIFICATION.SVGZ:
I intentionally didn’t touch notification.svgz because the notifier is already colored when active, and grayed out when inactive, which makes sense.Last changelog:
In order to replace icons of the breeze-* themes (on Kubuntu 22.04), put the icons in ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/default/icons . I also deleted ~/.cache/plasma* for good measure.
Actually, after I did this I got crashes and blank icons sometimes. What I did instead:
sudo cp *.svgz /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/default/icons
To undo:
sudo apt install --reinstall plasma-framework
10Thank you! I looked for this for such a long time! I think colored icons are so much easier to make out than the black-and-white ones that are in fashion across modern OSs (even though they're probably more accessible to tons of people who are not me). It's a shame there aren't any flat-design themes that use different colors for systray icons, but these still look good to me on a Breeze desktop! Thanks again /me happy
The instructions are invalid but otherwise the icons work and look great still on KDE5
On KDE5 instead of ~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/ , the location to place the icon theme is ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme
The KDE folks should include this theme as one of the official defaults -- it's *MUCH* easier to see against any background/theme that uses color, or by older users with less-than-perfect vision. If there's no OpenDesktop group for people that dislike simplistic monochrome icons, there should be!
You might warn people here on the page that if only some icons become colorized, it's because Ark & some other apps silently fail to replace existing files so we need to handle them manually. (It took me a couple of tries before I figured out why only the wifi icon changed.)
I had to install them in root/usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/default/icons log out and back in and they all took THANK YOU sooo much for that set of icons and the point in the direction to change them you have no idea how disappointed i was when they went to monochrome icons i hated them. i tried the directory that you was recommending and the icon folder was not there i made it and nothing happen im running oneiric kubuntu for others that try this open terminal do sudo dolphin and go to that directory i have listed and paste the icons in place "replace when prompted on what to do with duplicate file"
Uhm no, it is NOT necessary to overwrite the system icons. And in fact it is a horrible idea to do this because that way, the changes will be lost the next time the system theme is updated by the package management (e.g. because of a bugfix update to the package containing it).
What can be necessary is deleting the relevant cache file(s) (I'm not sure which it was, but most likely the plasma-svgelements-* one) in the ~/.kde/cache-*/ folder.
thanks for pointing that out but i did follow instructions you have posted so if it gets updated from the package management ill have the icons in the directory you have listed its odd though i have 11.04 in my notebook and it worked like a charm now that im thinking about it i didnt do the log out and back in after i added the icons folder and dropped the icons in place. hmmm well hats off to ya dude and thanks sooo much.
I've just spent about 2 hours trying to find out how to change those horrible white icons!!
(N.B. in case it's useful for others: I didn't have an existing "icons" folder so I had to create it. I then had to change my desktop theme to something else and then back again for the icons to change.)
Hi. These look great but I am unable to extract the archive. The error appears as follows:
Reading the archive '/home/dave/Downloads/oxygen-plasma-icons-1.tar.xz' failed with the error 'The archive reading failed with message: Unrecognized archive format: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character'
Which archiver application would you recommend. I have tried ark and xarchiver with the same error in both cases. TIA.
You need to have xz installed, then Ark will extract it just fine. http://tukaani.org/xz/
It's the latest GNU/Linux compression format, based on the LZMA algorithm. If your distribution is current enough to offer you KDE/Plasma 4.5 or if you built it yourself, I'm sure getting xz shouldn't be a problem, either. :-)
Hi. Thanks for the fast response. openSUSE 11.3 ships with xz 4.999.9beta-3.7 which I assume is too early a version. I will attempt to get V5.0 to compile and hopefully that will resolve the issue for me. Regards, Dave
I created that file with xz-4.999.9-0.2.beta.20091007git.fc13.i686, I don't know why it's not working for you.
I may end up uploading a tar.bz2 (which in this case is just minimally larger because most of the contents are already compressed svgz files) if xz is making such trouble.
Hi. I created an RPM from v5.0.0 sources and installed that. Ark still produced the error, but running unxz from the command line worked fine. I now have the icons installed. Excellent work, they look great. Many thanks for your comments regarding the xz archive. Best regards, Dave
Ratings & Comments
17 Comments
In order to replace icons of the breeze-* themes (on Kubuntu 22.04), put the icons in ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/default/icons . I also deleted ~/.cache/plasma* for good measure.
Actually, after I did this I got crashes and blank icons sometimes. What I did instead: sudo cp *.svgz /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/default/icons To undo: sudo apt install --reinstall plasma-framework
10 10 the best
10 Thank you! I looked for this for such a long time! I think colored icons are so much easier to make out than the black-and-white ones that are in fashion across modern OSs (even though they're probably more accessible to tons of people who are not me). It's a shame there aren't any flat-design themes that use different colors for systray icons, but these still look good to me on a Breeze desktop! Thanks again /me happy
The instructions are invalid but otherwise the icons work and look great still on KDE5 On KDE5 instead of ~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/ , the location to place the icon theme is ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme
The KDE folks should include this theme as one of the official defaults -- it's *MUCH* easier to see against any background/theme that uses color, or by older users with less-than-perfect vision. If there's no OpenDesktop group for people that dislike simplistic monochrome icons, there should be! You might warn people here on the page that if only some icons become colorized, it's because Ark & some other apps silently fail to replace existing files so we need to handle them manually. (It took me a couple of tries before I figured out why only the wifi icon changed.)
I had to install them in root/usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/default/icons log out and back in and they all took THANK YOU sooo much for that set of icons and the point in the direction to change them you have no idea how disappointed i was when they went to monochrome icons i hated them. i tried the directory that you was recommending and the icon folder was not there i made it and nothing happen im running oneiric kubuntu for others that try this open terminal do sudo dolphin and go to that directory i have listed and paste the icons in place "replace when prompted on what to do with duplicate file"
Uhm no, it is NOT necessary to overwrite the system icons. And in fact it is a horrible idea to do this because that way, the changes will be lost the next time the system theme is updated by the package management (e.g. because of a bugfix update to the package containing it). What can be necessary is deleting the relevant cache file(s) (I'm not sure which it was, but most likely the plasma-svgelements-* one) in the ~/.kde/cache-*/ folder.
thanks for pointing that out but i did follow instructions you have posted so if it gets updated from the package management ill have the icons in the directory you have listed its odd though i have 11.04 in my notebook and it worked like a charm now that im thinking about it i didnt do the log out and back in after i added the icons folder and dropped the icons in place. hmmm well hats off to ya dude and thanks sooo much.
I've just spent about 2 hours trying to find out how to change those horrible white icons!! (N.B. in case it's useful for others: I didn't have an existing "icons" folder so I had to create it. I then had to change my desktop theme to something else and then back again for the icons to change.)
Yeah!
Hi. These look great but I am unable to extract the archive. The error appears as follows: Reading the archive '/home/dave/Downloads/oxygen-plasma-icons-1.tar.xz' failed with the error 'The archive reading failed with message: Unrecognized archive format: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character' Which archiver application would you recommend. I have tried ark and xarchiver with the same error in both cases. TIA.
You need to have xz installed, then Ark will extract it just fine. http://tukaani.org/xz/ It's the latest GNU/Linux compression format, based on the LZMA algorithm. If your distribution is current enough to offer you KDE/Plasma 4.5 or if you built it yourself, I'm sure getting xz shouldn't be a problem, either. :-)
Hi. Thanks for the fast response. openSUSE 11.3 ships with xz 4.999.9beta-3.7 which I assume is too early a version. I will attempt to get V5.0 to compile and hopefully that will resolve the issue for me. Regards, Dave
I created that file with xz-4.999.9-0.2.beta.20091007git.fc13.i686, I don't know why it's not working for you. I may end up uploading a tar.bz2 (which in this case is just minimally larger because most of the contents are already compressed svgz files) if xz is making such trouble.
Hi. I created an RPM from v5.0.0 sources and installed that. Ark still produced the error, but running unxz from the command line worked fine. I now have the icons installed. Excellent work, they look great. Many thanks for your comments regarding the xz archive. Best regards, Dave
Looks good. I personally haven't liked the lack of colour for the default icons they have chosen.