I’m using XFCE launcher for shortcuts to frequently used programs in certain appVMs. I recently switched from the Fedora supplied Firefox to Firefox directly from Mozillas repository. (Because Fedoras repo lags with updates.)
Now the icons are very low resolution. I don’t know if the icon supplied by Mozilla is such low resolution or if something goes awry in Qubes making a colored version corresponding to the appVM color. Here’s an example comparison:
How to find out what is the culprit?
Assume the reason is indeed the used Mozilla icon version.
You can solve this by using the icon from the Fedora version, by changing the icon in Taskbar settings > Objects > Firefox launcher > icons … There should be two different firefox icons stored under …/applications/icons/… I guess.
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The launcher gets the icon from /user/.local/share/qubes-appmenus/*VMNAME*/apps.icons
However, since you have to uninstall the Fedora version to use the Mozilla version, that icon dissappears as well. I did find out if you don’t remove the missing application entry from the settings of that qube, the icon will still be there and you can copy it elsewhere to use. A bit of a pain though to go through for all the available colors, as I’ll have to create some new VM’s first based on a template with the Fedora version of Firefox.
You can narrow it down by comparing the icon sizes before Qubes colours them. In the template with the Mozilla package installed, check which firefox*.png sizes exist under /usr/share/icons/hicolor/*/apps/ (or wherever that package drops them). Then compare the generated copies in dom0 under ~/.local/share/qubes-appmenus/<vm>/apps.icons/.
If the template has 128/256 px icons but apps.icons only has a small PNG, the app-menu/icon extraction step is the part to look at. If the source is already small, copying the Fedora icon or choosing a known-good SVG/PNG manually is probably the cleanest workaround.
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Yes, the template has icons up to 128px for Mozilla package (no 256px). But in dom0 there is only a 16px generated copy.
In another template with the Fedora package, it has low res icons, but then skips the 128px version and does have a 256px version.
So maybe Qubes looks for the 256px version and if it does not find it, it will use the 16px version instead of trying 128px first.
After upgrading to Qubes R4.3 the behavior is still the same, so I opened an issue: Low resolution icon used for qubes icon extraction · Issue #10933 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub