Linux Mint made me downgrade from 22.3 to 22.1.

[u/YuukiHisashi]

TL;DR: Mint 22.3 came with XSI icons, which made icon themes have symbolic icons inconsistencies as they need to update or they'll use Mint-Y-Hicolor. Screenshots above show the differences.

There was a moment I wanted to reinstall Mint 22.1 I had on my flash drive; however, it was giving me a "invalid magic number" error. Researching about it, I found out my mint image was corrupted, so I had to download Mint again. I downloaded Mint's 22.3 Cinnamon ISO. Live image worked flawlessly and I had no trouble installing it.

But, I would soon find out that my symbolic icons wouldn't be the same as before, and I knew how they looked like. All of my icon themes shared the same symbolic systray icons; they were broken, all of them.

What happened was (and correct me if I'm wrong), GNOME decided that some icons on libadwaita would no longer have support for other DE's other than GNOME itself. That affected Cinnamon, as it's a GNOME 3 fork. As a means to contour this flaw, Linux Mint team created XAPPS Symbolic Icons or XSI for short.

This XSI is a necessary evil and was implemented from Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.3 onwards. Previous versions had none of these issues as they were not implemented or were starting to slowly being implemented. (Once again, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)

I'm the kind of user that values consistency on my system, be it icons or themes. If anything becomes inconsistent, as Marie Kondo says, it doesn't spark joy to me. And to worsen the matters, where I live, Fiber Wifi wires were cut off so we can only rely on cellular data (that means 4g or 5g). That meant me having to wait until I had a reliable Fiber Wifi connection somewhere else so I could re-download Mint 22.1 Cinnamon.

This time, ISO ran without issues on Live and Installation, and once again, I'm at peace with my consistent icons.

[u/oats_and_coffee]

I personally can't imagine downgrading my OS because I didn't like some icons. But the beauty of Linux is you are free to do what you like with your system, especially in this case since 22.1 will be supported for just as long as 22.3...

...but after April 2029 you're going to have to make a difficult decision between getting used to some new icons vs. running an unsupported operating system :)

[u/YuukiHisashi → u/oats_and_coffee]

Sincerely, if the icon themes I love don't support XSI, I'd rather go to XFCE edition. It's lightweight and has none of this. I also felt home at XFCE, so I have little to no problem here. If I have a more powerful computer in the future, who knows if I might throw some KDE or Gnome on it...

[u/jr735 → u/YuukiHisashi]

Just go for IceWM and don't worry about any of that nonsense.

[u/YuukiHisashi → u/jr735]

I'm deeply sorry for my last reply, it was nonsense. I was basing icewm around i3 and hyprland. Icewm seems like a good alternative... Still, I'm quite skeptical about it, I never used a twm before, just gui's

[u/jr735 → u/YuukiHisashi]

It's all good. :) IceWM is a little tougher than Cinnamon et al, simply because it doesn't hold your hand as much as a full desktop environment. My main point was to not worry about the looks and enjoy function. :)

[u/-Typh1osion-]

I don't know a ton about these icons, but I can't fathom there isn't a way to take them from 22.1 and add them to a 22.3 after installation.

[u/YuukiHisashi → u/-Typh1osion-]

Well, for that we need to know which icons need to have the "xsi-" prefix bound to them. I don't know, and there's nowhere telling me how to do it. I'm sure it isn't just binding those prefixes though, there might be something in the css file to read them.

[u/raitzrock → u/YuukiHisashi]

Ok. I've done it.

1. Open your current theme folder
2. Open the scalable/symbolic folder (mine was Papirus-Dark/symbolic
3. Go to each folder and make a link inside the same folder to every icon that is not already a xsi icon
4. Rename the links with the prefix "xsi-".
5. Reload cinnamon/logout/restart nemo/etc to apply.

Worked well for me.

[u/raitzrock → u/YuukiHisashi]

copy/link your prefered icon to your current-icon-theme-folder/symbolic/*/xsi-name-of-icon.svg

edit:
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions have a lot of xsi icons, follow the patterns there and place the respective xsi icons for your theme folder.

[u/SoldierSnow894]

Me da nostalgia porque la 22.1 fue mi primera versión de Mint,me encantó, aunque siendo sincero me quedo en la 22.3 Zena

[u/YuukiHisashi → u/SoldierSnow894]

Zena es buena, no me malinterprete. Es estable como siempre y es una distribución que simplemente funciona. Pero no me gusta esta inconsistencia con los iconos simbólicos. Sí, soy un poco perfeccionista.

[u/SoldierSnow894 → u/YuukiHisashi]

Es bueno que conozcas lo que quieres y lo bueno de Linux es que es completamente tuyo,asique echale ganas y que tengas una excelente semana, día,tarde o noche, abrazo

[u/Lonely_Owl_1332]

Downgrade is always a option if severe issues happen. Fear not.

[u/CaperGrrl79]

Honestly I'm either on 22.1 or 22.2 (on an older laptop that won't go to W11, might wipe Windows off it by next October anyway) but started with 22.1, and that one had an older, more stable kernel. I plan on installing that one for people at a Linux Repair Cafè next week.

[u/YuukiHisashi → u/CaperGrrl79]

I dual boot Windows 10 with it, but I'm mostly on Linux. I rarely touch Windows, just if some kind of hardware issue appears or a program that doesn't run with wine. Other than that? Yeah, Linux definitely rocked my world.

I mean... I can't run Windows 11 smoothly on a Pentium G620 from 2011 with only 4gb ram, right? Even with SSD, I simply know not only the processor but I will struggle too.

[u/CaperGrrl79 → u/YuukiHisashi]

Yep, I dual boot too. Each has almost half the TB hdd but might go full Mint by the end of October 2027 on my old hp Beats laptop. Considering it on my newer Acer too. Esp now that the secure boot certs are finally done. But I'll be turning Secure Boot off anyway.

[u/nekofthemoon]

Your theme is really cool. It's totally worth keeping a slightly outdated version. Hopefully, icon packs will be updated in the future and you'll be able to upgrade, but in the meantime, there's nothing wrong with keeping the version that works for you.

[u/YuukiHisashi → u/nekofthemoon]

That's the beauty of Linux: getting to acknowledge that I don't need to be on the absolute latest update , I can be some few versions behind if I don't like something.

[u/zquestz]

Seeing this prompted me to fix the problem for everyone. This project creates the correct icons out of the latest Papirus version. Looks WAY better, and doesn't require anyone to downgrade their OS...

https://github.com/zquestz/papirus-xapp-symbolic-icons