Notification area icon is hardly visible

[iwis]

severity: major reproducibility: always category: UI, Usability os version: Mint Cinnamon 16 and 17, 64-bit (Cinnamon 2.2, 2.0.14)

Description: Applet icon in default Mint Cinnamon theme (the theme is named "Linux Mint") is hardly visible: The icon is also hardly visible in "Cinnamon" theme. After changing to "Symbolic icons" in applet settings the aforementioned icon looks well:

Suggested solution: Selecting "Symbolic icons" by default or fixing the default (not symbolic) icon.

[mockturtl]

Good eye. Thank you for the report.

Symbolic icons have dark-on-light / light-on-dark contrast against the panel.

The default dark-on-dark is especially bad in "Minty."

[iwis]

By the way, why is the not-symbolic icon monochromatic? At the screenshot on http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/17 it is colour. Isn't it a bug?

[iwis]

I tried to check the reason of the error and here are the results - I bolded the most important information.

Firstly I think that all users using the Weather applet in Linux Mint Cinnamon have the problem with the notification area icon. To be sure I downloaded installation DVDs of both versions of LM Cinnamon: 64-bit and 32-bit one. Next I run computer from live DVDs and installed Weather applet. The problem is visible in both versions even when running Mint from Live DVD.

How are notification area icons chosen? In LM Cinnamon "System Settings > Themes > Other settings > Icons" is set to "Mint-X" and this means that icons are searched in "Mint-X" theme. Icons in Cinnamon (and Gnome) are located in: /usr/share/icons/THEME_NAME/ so our icons are in /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/ directory. Now we are searching for an icon with a proper name for example "weather-clouds.png" in "status" directory. For not-symbolic icon the system starts searching for icon from icon size 22 (at least for default height of bottom panel for my screen resolution). If there is no icon with this size, the system will search for icon with size 24, 32 etc. If it finds icon with different size it will be scaled, otherwise it will check in "Mint-X/index.theme" file which theme is a parent theme. "Mint-X" inherits from "Gnome" theme, and finally all themes inherit from "hicolor" theme implicitly. So if the system doesn't find icon in "Mint-X" theme it will search for it in "Gnome" theme ("hicolor" theme doesn't contain weather icons).

So where is a problem? Weather applet works well - it simply reads icons that are accessible in the system. "Mint-X" theme contains all needed weather icons in all sizes. If I am right the problem is that the weather icons in "Mint-X" theme are incorrect: if an icon background is dark then the icon foreground should not be dark, but it is here! The Mint-X icons come from "Faenza" theme (downloadable from www.gnome-look.org). The first problem is that they should came from "Faenza-Dark" version but they came from "Faenza" default version which is suitable for light themes. So the problem is in Linux Mint and thanks to fixing it the weather icons will be visible. But even if they came from "Faenza-Dark" they would be visible but not nice. This time they would be not black but gray and in my opinion they will not look nice comparing with the rest of icons from "Faenza-Dark" template including symbolic icons visible defaultly in LM Cinnamon, namely: power, network, bluetooth and sound icons, which are white. And in my opinion this is also a mistake in Faenza Dark theme but I am not sure about it because I don't know principles of designing themes. What should be done in my opinion? First of all we should ask Clem to check Mint-X icons theme. Secondly Clem can ask Faenza author to change weather icons in Faenza-Dark theme from gray to white (?) or colour (?). Through the whole text I was writing about not-symbolic icons, so event changing them to color will not change symbolic icons which will be still the same: white (or black).

I see on http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/17 that you came to a similar conclusion:

bimsebasse: With the most popular icon theme for Linux (Faenza) and dark panel a lot of the weather icons become illegible [...] mockturtl: This indicates it's a problem with Faenza. I don't know how themes work, so if there's a change I should make in the applet, I'll be happy to do so. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-February/msg00191.html

What can be done temporary to fix the problem? To temporary fix a problem we can manually replace weather icons in Mint-X theme with icons from Gnome theme by executing the following commands:

cd /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/status/22/
sudo find /usr/share/icons/gnome/22x22/status/ -regex ".*/weather-[a-z\-]*.png" -exec cp {} . \;
sudo ln -sf weather-few-clouds.png weather-clouds.png
sudo ln -sf weather-few-clouds-night.png weather-clouds-night.png

Two icons are not available in Gnome theme so we have to create shortcuts to appropriate existing icons.

[mockturtl]

Hello,

This issue is being closed because development is moving to linuxmint/cinnamon-spices/applets. Feel free to reopen your issue there.

Please see the release announcement here:

http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2017/01/changes-to-cinnamon-spices-for-developer-and-artists/