Flatpak and icon themes

Help
1

I noticed that the programs I installed with Flatpak do not use the right cursor theme, so my initial solution was to copy the Adwaita icon theme from /nix/store to ~/.icons which worked.

But I found out that the icons themes get symlinked to /run/current-system/sw/share/icons so I symlinked it to ~/.icons:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 broccoli users 35 14. led 23.10 .icons -> /run/current-system/sw/share/icons/

However this does not work, and I suspect that it is because the actual icon theme is owned by the root, can I chown it for my user, will I break anything? Or can I just change the owner group to users instead?

2

No, it’s because if flatpacks security model, which forbids reads outside of its sandbox, and the nix store, or some intermediate link is probably not readable for the flatpack.

3

Per https://tesk.page/2022/09/28/what-not-to-recommend-to-flatpak-users, ~/.icons is incorrect, and ~/.local/share/icons should be used instead.

4

Either way, this should no longer be necessary thanks to nixos/flatpak: pass system icons and fonts by io12 · Pull Request #262462 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

5

Hm, sadly, in the steam flatpak, I still see the xlib cursor, and fontconfig isn’t respected

6

Looks like the cursor issue was addressed by starting gsd-xsettings manually :thinking: