Humanity should provide symbolic versions of custom icons for GNOME Shell

We discussed it at GUADEC, the GNOME design is to use symbolic icons in the panel and our theme is missing ones to match our icons which creates the difference. But even if we fix the theme third party apps (and some of the default ones) are going to display a colored icon (e.g firefox) and it's going to be difficult to have visual conistency. One way would be to change the Ubuntu session to not display symbolic icons but always the normal one...

Is this humanity or just more missing icon symlinks (as usual) in ubuntu-themes?

I thought it was the latter when I logged bug 1700736.

Oh, sorry. This bug is about app icons. I was talking about indicators.

For now, let's use in the ubuntu session non symbolic icons:
- our theme doesn't support them and there are few changes we'll have app symbolic icons for our default applications in 17.10.
- for coherence reasons: most of branded apps outside of GNOME (firefox, chrome, thunderbird) don't have symbolic icons, and so, will appear colorized. Shipping two different experiences in the same session is weird. Let's ensure the ubuntu session don't use them by default thus.

Fedora includes a symbolic Firefox icon in their Firefox distro packaging:
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/rpms/firefox/blob/master/f/firefox-symbolic.svg

I think we should do the same and see about pushing that icon upstream.

I think it's up to the app developers to provide the symbolic icons not the icon theme.

Personally, the icon in the top bar is so small that a symbolic simpler monochrome icon is a bit more clear than a regular color icon.

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-shell - 3.24.3-0ubuntu2

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gnome-shell (3.24.3-0ubuntu2) artful; urgency=medium

  * Ship ubuntu GNOME Shell mode which will be a slightely modified
    mode compared to upstream vanilla GNOME Shell one:
    reference a cutomized ubuntu.css, with some based rules changes
    from the upstream one, like default font, no symbolic icon in the
    appmenu for coherence with other set of icons not having symbolic ones.
    We use regexp rules based on the source shell css, so that it's always
    in sync with shell theming on any update. (LP: #1698795)
  * Dropped debian/patches/ubuntu_font.patch, not needed anymore as we will
    have our own theme.
  * debian/patches/ubuntu_gdm.patch:
    as gdm is system-wide and not session-wide, ensure gdm has an ubuntu
    styling by default, not impacting the gnome user session though.
  * Bump Standard-Version to latest
  * Remove debian/gnome-shell.gsettings-override, as this is now in
    ubuntu-settings, and we will have per-session overrides there.

 -- Didier Roche <email address hidden> Mon, 14 Aug 2017 09:03:41 +0200