How to Have Vectorized Small Unity Icons in Ubuntu 14.04 by Defaults?

Question

I know that there are many icon theme packages, but really, I think Ubuntu should be able to provide vectorized icons with any settings found in the system. So please no third party packages for the task.

System Ubuntu 14.04 on Macbook Air 2013-mid natively, Linux kernel 4.2.0...-generic, display resolution is 1440x900. I really would like to have vectorised images. In Settings

Displays > Scale for menu and title bars: 0.875 which makes the icons rasterized and blurry.
Appearance > Launcher icon size less than 30. Etc 28 and 24. I cannot reproduce the effect with bigger icons.

The effect is independent of

Default theme. You choose Ambience (default), Radiance and High Contrast in Settings > Appearance > Theme. My examples are with High Contrast.
Background. Choose anything you like. I am using a "space" background in the examples.

How can you have Vectorized Unity Icons in Ubuntu 14.04 by Defaults?

The weird thing is that if I use the option to scale, it doesn't look at all like what you show in the image! — Jacob Vlijm, May 30 '16 at 15:29
A great icon theme which uses vectors is Numix Circle. See if that causes problems - I am myself currently using Numix Circle at 1440×900. — , May 30 '16 at 15:38
@Masi To install icon themes http://askubuntu.com/questions/116/how-do-i-get-and-install-more-themes-icons-and-pointers for numix http://www.noobslab.com/2014/04/install-numix-icon-packs-in-ubuntulinux.html — Mark Kirby, May 30 '16 at 15:43
@Masi To address your edit, could you at least try changing the icon theme, it seems to all commenter so far that that is a potential issue, how can we know about you issue if you just dismiss trouble shooting steps without even trying? — Mark Kirby, May 30 '16 at 15:49
@Masi Also could you try without high contrast as Jacob said? — , May 30 '16 at 15:59
@Masi I don't mean GTK theme (Ambiance, Radiance, High Contrast etc.) but icon theme. As far as I remember Unity doesn't have a way to change icon theme without using Ubuntu-Tweak-Tool. — , May 30 '16 at 20:48
@Masi Well, somehow the icon theme changed. It's not Ubuntu's default icon theme, called 'Humanity' — , May 30 '16 at 20:51
fyi, this the firefox icon I get with high contrast: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1155139/hc.png — Jacob Vlijm, May 31 '16 at 04:39
@Masi Still quite acceptable i'd say: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1155139/28.png — Jacob Vlijm, May 31 '16 at 06:07
Exactly, seems like there is no ant- aliassing on your screen for some reason. — Jacob Vlijm, May 31 '16 at 06:10

dobey · Answer 1 · 2016-05-30T20:57:16.457

3

The default icon theme in Ubuntu does use mostly vector (SVG) icons. For smaller sizes though, icons tend to be raster images, in order for the icons to be pixel perfect.

However, all graphics are going to be rendered into pixels for display. When you scale them to odd sizes, there are going to be artifacts, even for SVG icons.

For the best looking app icons in the launcher panel, make sure the launcher icon size is set to a value which is a multiple of 8, such as 32 or 48 pixels.

edited May 30 '16 at 20:57

answered May 30 '16 at 20:55

dobey

40,982

16 is too little. 32 is too big. Why so big gaps? Why not multiple of 2? I cannot understand why it cannot be implemented. To restrict users from using what they want is not the way to go. I need small icons to save space. Who is doing the algorithms of small icons? It is just a signal processing implementation. A piece of cake to maintain the actual content in vector format even with smaller images. – Léo Léopold Hertz 준영 May 30 '16 at 20:56
2

Then set it to 24 if that's what you want. All the icons in my launcher look fine with it set to 24 here. And pick a theme that has proper icons at the size you want to use; or make your own theme. – dobey May 30 '16 at 21:00
1

While I'll agree that perhaps the slider is not a good widget for selecting the launcher icon size, and it should be a drop-down instead with a set of hard-coded values, the fact is that it is not a "caveat of Ubuntu." There are too many variables, such as what theme is in use, what display is in use, etc… for any sort of "well, this is a bad choice for you" warning to be in the program. It's a subjective decision the user must make, and which is immediately evident from the icon rendering anyway. – dobey May 30 '16 at 21:08
Well, that's your opinion. I don't know what you think is a bug, but there is no "algorithm" that will fix your complaint. – dobey May 30 '16 at 21:11
1

@dobey good thinking, but I am not sure it is true. 28 px: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1155139/28.png – Jacob Vlijm May 31 '16 at 06:12

How to Have Vectorized Small Unity Icons in Ubuntu 14.04 by Defaults?

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