Panel bugs and Clementine icon is too big

Clementine(music player) icon is too big and doesn't fit the panel:

Horizontal

Vertical

I've tried all icon themes and all of them have the same result, this is Redmond panel with some customizations, and 30 something pixels, but the "full icon" needs a 55 pixel panel for horizontal mode and 60 pixels for vertical mode, the scaling is wrong.

I have noticed this with quite many softwares. Steam has similar giant icon. Teamviewer has quite big too.

Would be nice to have some solution for this.

I just noticed on the screenshot that the volume icon disappeared, maybe it’s another bug.

*Update: I’ts a bug, the volume icon disappear after closing Clementine with right-click on the panel.

I have uploaded a Steam icon in a thread (don’t remember where, it was a while ago, but you can probably find it by searching for “steam” on the forum). I don’t know if it’s been added in the icon theme for 18.04.

@ssspacez: have you tried icon themes that actually replace the Clementine systray icon for sure? It’s very likely that the issue is that the icon is available only in one big size (probably in the generic hicolor theme) and the themes you tried didn’t provide a replacement so the original one is still used.

EDIT: I don’t have Clementine installed but I’ve just checked that the Numix Circle theme provides a panel icon with various sizes that should be used by MATE (as long as Clementine is using an indicator, which I’m not sure in your case). You can give it a try, just to check if it works or if the issue is different than what I thought. Note that the icon theme is not in the Ubuntu repos, you’ll have to add Numix’s PPA to install it.

I’ve tried just the default Ubuntu MATE icon themes, all of them have this issue, maybe I will try another icon theme later, thanks for the advice.

Yeah, I’m about 99.99% sure that none of them provide icons for applications (apart from the ones specific to MATE).

I installed a few other icon themes and the icon is still wrong no matter what I try, for example

numix-icon-theme

tango-icon-theme

It's probably one or more bugs, I have no idea where exatcly. And it creates another bug when I close Clementine via panel, the volume icon disappear. The volume icon comes back when I change the position of the panel(left/right/top/bottom).

Further info:

Desktop: MATE 1.18.0 (Gtk 3.22.25-0ubuntu0.1)
Distro: Ubuntu 17.10
mate-panel (1.18.4-2ubuntu0.1) artful -
Panels: Pantheon and Redmond, I think other panels too.

Update: the volume icon disappearing happened too when I was hovering the cursor and scrolling to change to volume, I reinstalled pulseaudio packages and it's working again. But the Clementine icon is still big.

I’ve installed Clementine to look into this and I can confirm that it does not behave as it should. I suspect that it’s hard-coded to use the big icon it installs in /usr/share/pixmaps and not follow the icon theme, in which case there’s not much to do.

There’s a general issue with the indicators area used by MATE, Clementine isn’t the only software that displays a big icon when no proper one is available in the icon theme.

EDIT: after a few tests, I’m beginning to think that the icon is embedded in Clementine itself and doesn’t use the ones installed in proper places. Also, the Ubuntu Mono themes, which Ambiant and Radiant MATE use, has a Clementine panel icon, so if it would work properly, it should with the default MATE theme (my 99.99% assumption from above was wrong).

Here is a fix for Clemetine, also mentioned in this bug report:

# This is for the mono themes, change it to suit your needs 
#THEME="light"
THEME="dark"
mkdir -p "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/22x22"
mkdir -p "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/32x32"
mkdir -p "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/48x48"
ln -sf "/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-$THEME/apps/24/clementine-panel-grey.png" "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/22x22/clementine-panel-grey.png"
ln -sf "/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-$THEME/apps/24/clementine-panel.png" "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/22x22/clementine-panel.png"
ln -sf "/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-$THEME/apps/24/clementine-panel-grey.png" "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/32x32/clementine-panel-grey.png"
ln -sf "/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-$THEME/apps/24/clementine-panel.png" "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/32x32/clementine-panel.png"
ln -sf "/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-$THEME/apps/24/clementine-panel-grey.png" "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/48x48/clementine-panel-grey.png"
ln -sf "/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-$THEME/apps/24/clementine-panel.png" "$HOME/.config/Clementine/customiconset/icons/48x48/clementine-panel.png"

I think the indicator area (or the panel) is failing to scale icons.

For this example, the panel was configured to 100 px size, and Plank icon size was set 100 px too, Plank has the correct size, the Clementine icon at the panel stays at 64 px or some number near that, and the rest of the icons don't scale:

and now 24 px :

Plank scaling works but the icons on the panel are not scaling correctly, they are "cut" as you decrease the panel size. For this example the numix-icon-theme was used, but it happens with other icon sets.

It’s kind of normal that the icons don’t scale up: the indicators have been designed (by Canonical) to use 16, 22 and 24 px icons, and icon themes usually include these sizes only, not bigger icons. If you check the Numix or Ubuntu Mono icon themes, you’ll see these sizes only. It’s also worth noting they were designed for an horizontal panel (Unity’s), which might explain why they’re cut on the side on your last screenshot (i.e. I assume they’re scaled depending on the vertical size available and with that point of view, they fit).

I’m not sureif they’re scaled down when there are bigger icons on Unity but I don’t remember having seen this issue with Steam when I was using it.

The "cuts" happen on the entire panel, for example horizontal panel with 22 pixels

mate-menu icon on the left is not being scaled, it's being cut.

It’s a bit different: the MATE Menu isn’t an indicator. Same apparent issue but cause might be completely different.

In the case of MATE Menu, if it’s the advanced menu I’m thinking of, it doesn’t use the icon themes and so doesn’t handle various icon sizes, it juste uses an icon set in its preferences, with a single size, so I guess it doesn’t bother checking if it fits and the developer just assumed that users will use a standard panel size in which it displays fine.

I’ve noticed MATE Tweak has options to change icon sizes but they are fixed values, the efficient way would be making all of them scalable or to be able to change the icon size pixel by pixel like Xfce panel.

If you mean the Toolbar option in the Interface section (small or big icons), this has nothing to do with the panels/applets/indicators but with the icon sizes in the softwares interface when they use toolbars. There is no way this setting could affect anything in the panels.

Why not use Gimp and rescale the icon to a smaller size?

That’s what icon themes do (except that icons are usually vector files, so it would be Inkscape rather than Gimp): they include icons at various sizes. The problem is that:

  • most icon themes don’t provide the needed icons (most of them are far from complete);
  • some apps are a specific case (e.g. Clementine seems to look for the icons in its config files rather than in the icon theme set by the user);
  • some apps use a specific icon at a specific size (and would need to manually change the icon every time the panel is resized); e.g. the MATE advanced menu.

When apps are properly made and the icon theme used is complete enough, everything works well. When it’s not the case, things break.

TL;DR: it’s not as simple as that.

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Thanks for the explanation.

Good evening everyone, I apologize in advance for replying to a 2 year old post. Today while using clementine I "solved" the problem of the giant icon in the notification area. Just play a song and move the playback slider back and forth and the icon will automatically resize to the correct size. Obviously you have to do the procedure out every time clementine is opened. It is not a solution to the problem but a way around it. I thought you were interested in knowing.

Since this thread is still active - I'll post my 2 cents worth. I had a similar problem with the Currency Indicator (3rd party ppa app). It seems that appindicator doesn't resize SVG icons. However, it does resize PNG icons without any issues. So I just resized the indicator icons to 32px (original size was 256px) - and the icon shows up fine in the panel now :smiley:

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