Use libreoffice-style-breeze as the default icon theme

[Frederik Feichtmeier]

The Yaru icon theme uses 1 pixel strokes for its symbolic icon set.
So do the breeze icons for libreoffice.

All in all does the breeze icon set for libre office fit very good to the look of the Yaru icons.

https://i.imgur.com/tgioycv.png

https://i.imgur.com/WwKvjMh.png

Thus I would suggest to use it as the default icon set in Ubuntu to guarantee a consistent look and feel across the desktop

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

libreoffice selects the default icon theme dynamically based on the desktop environment. breeze is already the default icon theme on KDE and LXQt, whereas GNOME, Mate and Unity use elementary by default (see https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/vcl/source/app/IconThemeSelector.cxx#n51).

We can certainly patch this code to make breeze the default on GNOME, but I'd like to hear the opinions of other visual designers (including all yaru contributors) and users before we do.

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

Please could someone add a couple of screenshots for Before and After.
We can ask design to comment.

[Carlo Lobrano (c-lobrano)]

On one side, breeze icons might look a bit colder, but they're actually graphically closer to yaru's symbolic icons

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

Hm. Tricky. I quite like the straightforwardness of the Breeze icons. But I also tend to use the "feel" of the icons to navigate quickly, and that comes from colour as well as shape. So I don't really have a proper answer at this point. I will loop in Design for more informed feedback.

[Stuart Jaggers (jaggers)]

In isolation I don't prefer one icon set to the other, but I agree that Breeze is a better fit for the desktop style, so I would be +1.

[amano (jyaku)]

Hmm. Personally I prefer Colibre as I find it to be the most professional icon theme for LibreOffice. But if the Yaru team feels that Breeze fits Yaru better, then go for it.

And please test the themes with the shiny new tabbed layout interface because that will be the one people will switch to over time.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The breeze icons are calmer, and they are clearer in a few cases: for example, New (where elementary squanders 🗋 recognisability in redundantly conveying what kind of file will be created), Cut (where elementary’s puffy scissors look to me like a rabbit using binoculars), and, though it pains me to say it, Save (where a floppy disk might be a relic, but elementary’s arrow-on-a-rectangle is just mysterious). And breeze uses a “+” emblem more consistently, for the various Insert commands, than elementary does.

In other cases, the elementary icons are much clearer: for example, Save as PDF (I have no idea what breeze is trying to do there), Paste (where breeze’s icon would work equally well for Copy!), Rows, and Columns. (I don’t understand why breeze uses any diagonal lines in the last two.)

Overall, though, I agree with Will. Unfortunately, the massive number of buttons LibreOffice displays at once — and the resulting tinyness of each icon — makes it impractical for them to use colour as little as the Breeze theme does. (This is the crucial difference with Frederik’s comparison of a Nautilus sidebar that has only 13 items in it.) The LibreOffice buttons are so numerous, and so tiny, that hardly anyone will think, for example, “I want to insert a picture — oh, look, the seventeenth button along looks a bit like a landscape picture, maybe that’s what I want”. Instead, if they use the toolbar button at all, they’ll use it after having read its tooltip, or after instruction from someone else. And whether or not they find it themselves, it’s much easier to be told, to remember, and to find it quickly later if, “Insert Picture is the blue and orange wavy block” rather than having to rely solely on shape, “Insert Picture is the one with a zig-zaggy triangle and a little circle above it”.

> Personally I prefer Colibre as I find it to be the most professional

Well, professional is not a word I’d choose — I don’t see any consistency in its use of outlined vs. non-outlined shapes, sometimes even in the same icon. But Colibre does use colour about as much as I think a theme for this many buttons needs to.

[Frederik Feichtmeier (feichtmeier)]

Both breeze and colibre would be a great improvement over the elementary icons, in terms of consistency.
If colibre fits you more due to it's colors, I would also +1 this decision, to get rid of those eOS 3d icons, that really don't fit at all to the Yaru symbolic icon set.

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

Would someone be able to post some screenshots showing Colibre so that we can all see what's being discussed?

I've used this page as a primer: https://colibreoffice.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/libreoffice-6-1-fits-windows-10/

and on first inspection, I like.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for the detailed analysis mpt!

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

I'm a +1 for Colibre too

[Frederik Feichtmeier (feichtmeier)]

There is one problem with colibre: it doesn't work with dark themes :/

Whereas breeze has a dark and a light variant for yaru and yaru dark

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.