So, this is quite the hilarious predicament. Whenever my system updates in the background through what I believe to be the Ubuntu software updater, it just flashes a picture of the United Nations in the notification area asking me to restart. Of course, it goes away with a restart, but it comes back up eventually.
I don't think the United Nations is on my tail, but I very much would not like to get jumpscared by this international organization. What would I have to do to remove this?
Thanks.
Welcome @Sineis_Arilla to the community!
Thank you @Bombilla for the welcome.
Welcome, @Sineis_Arilla. 
I apologize for only seeing your post now -- I have been extremely sick (almost terminally ill 
) for months and have only recently really started getting better. But now, I would like to explain what's going on.
What theme are you using? The Update Notifier program, which displays the notification telling you to reboot, is looking for an icon with the name un-reboot. The un in the name here is supposed to stand for Update Notifier. Your icon theme apparently doesn't contain an icon with that name, however; it's default policy in GTK, the support "library" Update Notifier uses, to look for a"fallback" icon which lacks the part of the name after the hyphen (-) character, so it looks for an icon called un. There is one -- it's a big, 640x480 picture of the United Nation's flag.
I'll patch it for you and try to get it sent "upstream", if you want. It's pretty easy to fix; nevertheless, if it's not super-important to you, I've got better things to do.
(Source: reboot.c « src - ubuntu/+source/update-notifier - [no description])
Hi, @gordon 
I'm very glad to see you back here in the "Ubuntu MATE Community"! I'm very sorry that you have been extremely sick 
Good that you are now getting better. I really hope that you soon completely recover
This issue of the the UN (United Nations) flag / emblem / logo appearing in Ubuntu MATE has indeed appeared a few times here in the "Ubuntu MATE Community". The first discussion topic is this one we're in now, that was started by @Sineis_Arilla on 14th May of the current year (2024). Then, on the following month (on 2nd June 2024), here in the "Ubuntu MATE Community", the following similar discussion topic was started by @surfrock66:
In that other topic, you can find the following answer by @ironfoot (accepted as being the "Solution" of that topic) where @ironfoot found the likely "cause" of the issue which has now been confirmed by you, @gordon (thank you very much for that!), that is: "un" = "United Nations" but also "un" = "update notifier" !
About three months later (on 12th September 2024), @mickee started a similar topic:
... and I referred @mickee to the previous topic and to the finding made by @ironfoot :
Finally, about a month ago, on 12th September 2024, @courrier started the following somewhat similar topic, related to the cc compiler icon appearing as the flag of Cocos Islands and the sh icon appearing as the flag of Saint Helena in "MATE System Monitor":
In that discussion, @ironfoot contributed again:
... and @courrier replied saying that he previously reported the "UN" flag bug on Launchpad ( "Bug #2080836 “When reboot is needed, notification applet shows blue world logo” : Bugs : Ubuntu MATE"- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate/+bug/2080836):
So, @gordon, if you could please submit a patch upstream to fix the "United Nations" flag issue, as you've kindly suggested, that would be great! Also, if it's easy for you to create and submit a similar patch to the "sh" and "cc" country flags issue in "MATE System Monitor", that would also be great!
Thank you very much and, again, I hope that you quickly and completely recover from your health issues!
copy-pasting the solution from the other thread:
as root:
(1) mv /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/status/un.svg /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/status/un.unitednations.svg
(2) ln -s /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/un-reboot.png /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/status/un.svg
(3) killall mate-panel
Thanks, this is where I landed with this page still open as one of my 28 emotional support tabs...instant fix.
I made a PR here to fix that bug Fix Yaru icons (UN, SH, and CC flags) by ymollard · Pull Request #86 · ubuntu-mate/ubuntu-mate-artwork · GitHub
@ricmarques @gordon or anyone: do you know how to move things forward?
I proposed a PR here in december, asking also how we could help if that was not the right thing to do, and quoted the main maintener several times, but he keeps ignoring messages while he's being active on Github on a regular basis.
Do you know any other maintainer able to either merge that PR, or fix the bug properly if the PR is not right?
I had a look at why the flags are here in the first place, and it was to fix this bug:
So, after replicating the original steps (install a keyboard layout, enable icons) and testing your changes, renaming them to gb-flag.svg wouldn't work.
I looked at Ambiant-MATE, and it works. That inherits the icons from /usr/share/icons/mate/scalable/animations (the theme inherits mate)
It probably needs a look at the code rendering the indicator (ayatana-indicator-a11y-service) if they can support <code>-flag.svg or to get clarity from them on how themes should use the flags to avoid the issue.
I'm not sure what other programs do. I don't think gb.svg 
is a standard icon name for country flags, I haven't seen other icon themes use it.
Thanks for testing, @lah7 
I have same bug on Ubuntu-MATE 24.04. I can confirm it not fixed yet. Right today I seen this flag on panel.
FYI
Dear Aleksey,
Ubuntu Mate community forum is not a bug tracker (i.e. error reporting service) nor for MATE desktop environment nor for Ubuntu Linux distribution. Next to it, it is not developers' but users' forum.
That is your note on not fixed (yet) bug is of no purpose here.
Nevertheless, I sincerely hope that this thread provided you with a solution to eliminate undesired UM glitch.
I understand. May be later I post a bug to bug tracker. Sadly bug reports there can be long time without answer.
