Arch Linux

Shapeshifter

Member

Registered: 2008-03-11

Posts: 230

How to: Fixing missing icons in gtk applications

I'm posting this for others to stumble upon, since the other threads covering this problem are already closed or very old, and none of them answer the question sufficiently.

Upon updating a few days ago, I lost all icons in some gtk applications, for example nautilus and evince (side by side on this screenshot):

I searched through the forums and google and found several suggested solutions:

• Reinstalling librsvg

• Reinstalling gtk-update-icon-cache

• Running /usr/bin/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders --update-cache as root

None of these things made any difference for me, not even after rebooting. You can try them, but what finally made things work for me was:

1. Install any other icon theme, e.g. oxygen-icons

2. Use lxappearance/gtk-theme-switch2 or manually edit .gtkrc-2.0 to change the icon theme to the newly installed one

3. Open one of the affected gtk applications - Most of the icons will be shown

4. Change the icon theme back to whatever you had before (GNOME/hicolor in my case)

5. Now all the icons in evince/nautilus seem fixed and you can uninstall the other icon theme

There must be a more straight-forward method, but /usr/bin/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders --update-cache is not it and at least this method worked for me.

Last edited by Shapeshifter (2013-10-11 09:23:03)