Gnome legacy icon theme

When I started with Linux, back in 2005, the desktop environment that came with the distro was Gnome 2.6. I was very impressed with its icon theme, and won’t lie to say that I fell in love with it. At Gnome 2.16, the next generation, Tango-like theme was introduced. I do like it, I also like Tango very much. However, I made an attempt to revive the pre-2.16 theme.

As a start, I used gnome-icon-theme 2.14.2, gPerfection2, OldGNOME2 (another attempt to revive it), as well as a bunch of stuff from the Gnome archive. I also modified some icons and created others, by combining elements of the existing ones. I named the result, which is very much a work in progress, as:

Gnome Icons legacy.

That’s a preview of the mime types:

Since I introduced some new mimetypes, such as RDS used in R and so on, I also created a custom mimetypes file. I placed it in /usr/share/mime/packages and ran:

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

In addition, I also made an attempt to revive my favourite folder icons, the Smokey Blue. These inherit gnome-icons-legacy:

These work pretty well on Xfce 4.12, as long you set your Thunar icons to be of size 48×48, your toolbar icons to 24×24 and menus to 16×16 (except the applications menu, which works pretty well at 24×24). To do these things, I set bigger menu icons, as before. However, I further modified the “IconSizes” row in, as follows:

    <property name="IconSizes" type="string" value="gtk-menu=16,16:gtk-button=24,24:panel-applications-menu=24,24:panel-directory-menu=24,24:gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-small-toolbar=24,24"/>

As a result, all toolbars are big:

This may work on 4.12, but does not work well on 4.16. Really, newer versions of the desktop just expect icons to come in all kind of sizes, which is not the case with Gnome Icons legacy.