The system tray WiFi icon is not displayed when I activate VPNs with some of the stock themes included with OpenSUSE Leap 42.1. This problem seems to occur primarily with most dark themes such as the Oxygen Theme or the OpenSUSEdark theme. Whereas, the icon is displayed with light themes, such as the openSUSE theme as well as one dark theme; Breeze Dark. This problem is definitely dependent on which theme that is being used. In any event, does anybody know of a quick workaround? Otherwise, I would like to file a bug report, however, I am not sure whether it is more appropriate to file the bug with OpenSUSE or KDE. I am talking specifically about the themes that are included with stock OpenSUSE Leap 42.1. However, I believe that the Oxygen Theme is provided upstream by KDE whereas I think that the OpenSUSEdark theme is supplied by OpenSUSE. So, I’m not sure whether it would be best to file the bug with OpenSUSE or KDE. Any suggestions on where to file the bug?
First, try to make sure your problem is re-producible, and collect details which are important to describing your problem and would be important if you file a bug report. Possibly take a screenshot and post so others can see what you are describing.
I assume you feel that icons are disappearing into certain backgrounds?
Yes, the Plasma 5 WiFi icon disappears when a VPN is activated. For example, with the Oxygen Desktop Theme selected, here is a screenshot of my system tray with wifi active but without an active VPN:
Notice that the WiFi icon has disappeared in the system tray when the VPN is activated. (The Wifi icon is the sixth icon from the left.) I can reproduce this repeatedly with the Oxygen Theme, the OpenSUSEdark theme and other dark themes. However, the WiFi icon does not disappear when a VPN is activated with most all light themes, such as the openSUSE theme as well as one dark theme; Breeze Dark. I have two separate VPNs that I activate with the Plasma 5 Network Manager and the WiFi icon always disappears when either of the two VPNs are activated with the Oxygen Theme and the OpenSUSEdark theme for example.
I should also mention that the same thing happens with a wired connection whereby the wired connection icon disappears when a VPN is activated as well.
And no, a bug report about this won’t help at all. It works with breeze, and that’s the only theme that’s really supported.
PS: compare /usr/share/plasma/desktop-theme/default/icons/network.svgz with the one from a theme that doesn’t work (in inkscape e.g.), and you’ll probably see what the problem is…
PPS: the openSUSE themes are basically just taken over from KDE4 (and are therefore incomplete as well). Nobody is working on them (AFAIK) and nobody in the openSUSE KDE team has the time or skills to do that. That’s why we switched to using breeze as default.
I forgot to add:
A possible workaround would be to delete the network.svgz file from the used desktop theme (then the one from breeze will be used), or copy it over from breeze (i.e. “default”) or breeze-dark.
Or open it up in inkscape and add the missing icons yourself…
Deleting the network.svgz file in the oxygen theme appears to fix the problem.
The breeze-dark and breeze-light themes are apparently incomplete too since they do not have the icon directory so I can’t copy the network.svgz file from those themes either…
I’ll investigate this further including adding the missing icon with inkscape, however, it will be a few days before I am able do that…
Deleting the network.svgz file is effectively the same as using the file from the default theme, so instead of editing the oxygen file it might be easier to start with the default one. The openSUSEdark theme network.svg file seems to work although it does not have all the default icons.
When I was using the oxygen theme I noticed that when I disconnected from the network the icon disappeared, but Icould raise the Network Manager by clicking in the space that should have contained an icon.
Well, they are not exactly incomplete, they use the icons from the default theme on purpose as they are only variations of the default theme (they apparently only change the color scheme).
I only suggested taking it from breeze-dark because I thought the default one might not look too well with a dark theme. Sorry, should have checked first…
Yes, it is.
But if you delete it, it will be brought back when you install updates.
To prevent this, you could “override” the theme (or parts thereof) in /usr/local/share/ or ~/.local/share/. But obviously you cannot delete files that way, only replace them.
I simply copied the theme to my local directory and renamed it after deleting the network.svgz file which should solve the problem of the theme being overwritten by updates.
But just to avoid a misunderstanding: this will only be in Frameworks 5.28.0, to be released in about a month.
And I have no idea whether this will end up in a 5.26.x LTS update (which is what 42.2 will ship with).
I am thinking of adding the latest network.svgz to our current packages in the next days though (maybe I’ll even submit an update for 42.1 too).
But currently, the “airplane mode” icons are still missing as I just noticed, and the “Refresh” one (to rescan for wireless networks) too.
VPN connections are shown fine now though, I have only tried with wired not wireless yet, but the icons seem to be in the file for wireless as well.
I’ve decided to do a test drive of Tumbleweed and so I upgraded one of my laptops and, so far, its working well. I assume that these enhancements will land on Tumbleweed as well sometimes soon when Frameworks 5.28.0 is included.
Yes, these improvements will be in Frameworks 5.28.0, which will be submitted to Tumbleweed shortly after its release at the beginning of November.
Of course it will take a while until the submissions go through review and staging/testing, so I’d expect it around the middle of November.
But we may do an extra update that adds those icons earlier…
As I previously mentioned, I am test driving Tumbleweed on one of my laptops and the default breeze theme does not properly display the WiFi icon and lock when a VPN is active whereas it worked fine on Leap 42.1. On Tumbleweed, the breeze theme displays a greyed out WiFi icon with a question mark when a VPN is active. Whereas, on Leap 42.1, the WiFi icon is properly presented (not greyed out) along with a lock icon when a VPN is active.
On my custom Oxygen theme, I got it to properly display the icons by deleting the network.svgz file so that it then used the default icons. However, now with Tumbleweed, none of the themes appear to properly display the WiFi icon when a VPN is active.
There was a NetworkManager upgrade in Tumbleweed recently with an incompatible change, i.e. a bug, that will be fixed in the next version AIUI.
That caused similar problems with normal WiFI (because plasma-nm was not being able to get the current state of NetworkManager, and just displayed that greyed out icon with a question mark therefore), but likely with VPN too.
In other words, this is not related to the desktop theme icons at all.
We (I) submitted an upstream workaround for plasma-nm for this already, so it should work if your system is up-to-date. So try to run “zypper dup”.
OTOH, I’m not completely sure if that fixes the VPN case too.
