> The icon theme displayed in the open letter is just garbage.

A lot of icon themes are pure garbage, or at least incomplete. I don't think the example chosen here is any worse than what I've seen on my own system. Honestly, most icon themes are a failure; visual metaphors are just plain hard, and there's no substitute for literacy.

True. But what about the icon themes major distributions pick?

That's fair; the major distributions usually choose better themes. There are also minor distributions, however…

Minor distributions have a minor impact. And the few people who use them presumably do so because they like the weird choices the distributions make.

Meaning isn't binary and "system-search" could mean many different subtly different things depending on the application and the context. Often the choice of icon requires context that factors in the specific iconography.

For example, what happens when there's system searching element that needs to be in visual proximity to a magnification, zooming or loupe-inspection element? It's impossible to know if an icon theme is going to maintain consistency and/or disambiguity with the default theme.

> Meaning isn't binary and "system-search" could mean many different subtly different things depending on the application and the context.

Actually, "system-search" is always "The icon used for the “Search” item in the desktop's panel application.".[1] Admittedly that makes it a bad example because an application generally doesn't need this icon.

> For example, what happens when there's system searching element that needs to be in visual proximity to a magnification, zooming or loupe-inspection element?

Hopefully, the application uses the standard icons. The user might have difficulties distinguishing idiosyncratic, unfamiliar icons.

[1] https://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-nami...

I had to write quite a lot of messages to icon theme devs to add icons I was missing in XFCE with their theme. They happily added them but from users point it seemed like they needed someone to tell them which ones were missing because they just didn't know. So having a more complete list would be nice.

Is the icon naming spec even still maintained? The most recent change log entry is for version 0.8 in 2006, but at the top it says 0.8.90.

Freedesktop.org is kinda bad at showing that it isn't a dead organization.

I had this issue back in 2013 so I have very little idea what's the current situation, didn't change my icon pack since then, however before I wrote the post I did check archive.org and it seems like last update was around 2011, so nothing's changed since then

The 0.8.90 is also wrong, since then there've been some changes - diff:

+ system-reboot The icon used for the “Reboot” item in the desktop's panel application.

+ user-available The icon used when a user on a chat network is available to initiate a conversation with.

- user-online The icon used when a user on a chat network is available to initiate a conversation with.