Missing icons should have a sensible replacement

KDE is bugged and use the wrong directory to put its icons, that's a known hoary
bug(#8341) which should be fixed with the current version. Does that fixes the
issue for you?

No it doesn't. That is great news though, so we won't see that much missing
icons anymore. But I think there will always be some programs/packages that have
missing icons, so I would suggest having a sensible replacement for those
missing icons. If you base it on which submenu the program is in, you can have
nice looking icons, which at least make some sense to the user for all of them...

users already open a category, I don't think that doing an icon matching the
category will change something. The right fix is to open bugs on all the apps
with a desktop file and no icons. I'm closing this bug, feel free to reopen if
you disagree.

Hmm I think I disagree... from the spec: Even if we don't have a unique icon for
each application, could
we at least have some more variety based on the type of program?

In a perfect world every program has a nice icon of itself, and I agree
bugreports should be filed for all that don't have one. But this isn't a perfect
world and there is always a possibility that there will be programs without an
icon in the menus. And this can also happen when you compile a program from
source. Of course you could go and fix it yourself or ask the author to fix it,
but also I think it would be more userfriendly to have sensible default icons
for them. Not to know which category they are in, and the icon should definitely
be a different icon than the one of the category, but for the purpose of not
having a bad-looking icon between all the beautiful ones of Ubuntu :-)

At the moment if an icon is missing, it looks really bad I think, and if it only
was a little bit more goodlooking, I wouldn't go through all the hassle of
changing it.

It isn't really a big deal, but I think it can make Ubuntu just a little bit
more user-friendly...

Oh, and for the end-user, filing a bug about a missing icon isn't really a
solution as it will only get fixed in the future, so it would be right to have
some sort of temporary solution (which the default icon is, it could just be
better than that.) And most users probably don't know about bugzilla.

thanks for the comment. Could you describes some of default icons you would use
and how you would match a program name to an icon automatically?

The easiest solution for matching an icon for a program I think would be to base
it on which submenu they are in... So that means a default icon for games, one
for office, one for internet etc... so you would need 7 icons. I think that
wouldn't be hard to implement.

As for the icons, I think it is best that someone makes some new ones? I am not
a great artist myself though... Or maybe there are existing icons that could be
used, I don't really know.

The icons could be similair to the icons used for the submenus themselves. Just
for the variety I wouldn't use exactly the same icons, although having the same
icon as the submenus could make it clear that it is an default icon instead of
one defined by the program.

there is an upstream bug about this too:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76495. I'm not convinced than a
standard icon based on the category would be any better, you open one submenu at
time so a standard default icon should be fine

The discussion about the upstream bug feels like very much aimed at the
developers, e.g. see this line:

>> Gnome icon but ugly one.
>> so for developer, surely they dont want their apps with ugly icon

I think Ubuntu is much more aimed at end-users and the icon for the program
should represent its function as closely as possible... the generic icon would
be fine for applications which don't belong in any of the existing categories.
Will Ubuntu follow Gnome in choices like these? Or is there room for different
choices than the upstream package?

>> you open one submenu at time so a standard default icon should be fine

What difference would it make how much submenus are open at a time?

My main points are that there should be an icon, it should look good and it
should represent the programs function as good as possible, which a generic icon
doesn't.

(In reply to comment #9)
> The discussion about the upstream bug feels like very much aimed at the
> developers, e.g. see this line:

Free to you to try moving to somewhere else, GNOME is all about users too.

> Will Ubuntu follow Gnome in choices like these? Or is there room for different
> choices than the upstream package?

We can pick other choices (we already are doing it, upstream have no icons for
these entries, the default icon is an ubuntu patch)

> What difference would it make how much submenus are open at a time?

What is the issue to have a generic icon, why do you want to set them by submenu ?

> My main points are that there should be an icon, it should look good and it
> should represent the programs function as good as possible, which a generic icon
> doesn't.

Right, every desktop file should point to a correct icon. That's the case with
the default desktop, there is no reason to not fix other packages. We can also
make a better default icon, as said before suggestions about this are welcome ...

I marked this as fix released, as almost all programs have their own icon now, so it is not much of a problem any more.