I use Ubuntu, and for anyone who hasn’t tried it (especially if you use windows) give it a shot. You will be very impressed. This weekend I was looking for a really good icon pack. After the upgrade to hardy I stopped using Thunar for my file manager. This is because the new version of Nautilus has fixes for a lot of the things I had problems with. However, there were a few issues with the icon themes I have been trying. I’m actually using an icon theme that’s in the ubuntu repositories. The icon theme is used by Ubuntu Studio, which is a version of Ubuntu aimed at multimedia development.
Obviously when picking an icon pack the most important thing is how they look graphically. A lot of new icon themes have issues with emblems. Most noticeably the desktop emblem which you see in your home folder on the desktop folder. A lot of icon themes are missing this emblem, so what you see is the default gnome desktop emblem. A lot of times the default emblem just doesn’t fit well. What I’ve found is that most icon themes actually have a desktop icon, they just aren’t duplicated in the emblems directory.
So, what you can do is copy the desktop icon into the emblems folder and rename it to emblem-desktop.svg (or png depending on the type of theme).
After this change, it looks like this:
There’s also a bug in Nautilus that will cause the emblems to be cut off if the icons are sized above 100%. You can see this in action here:
There’s a pretty simple fix for this problem. All that is needed to fix this issue is to create a single file that instructs Nautilus to render the emblems on the righthand side of the icons. The bug seems to only occur when the emblems are close to the right edge of the icons. The file needs to be called folder.icon, and it needs to go in your /usr/share/icons/{ThemeName}/{IconSize}/places/ folder. The file should look like this:
[Icon Data]
AttachPoints=0,0|0,400|0,800
After the fix the emblems will look something like this:
You can tweak the attach points to your liking, but keep the x value near the left side. The braces separate the position of each of the potential emblems. Three should be enough, most icons won’t have more than two emblems. Like I said, tweak away. Hopefully this picky people out there (like me).
Disgruntled Developers 