Icon themes modifying the developer-provided icons was always a strange thing to me in many Linux distributions.
Even often hard or hidden to disable this behavior.
My workaround already was using Breeze, since it does the least modification compared to other themes available by default. Glad to see it continue in this direction.
Well, the point of custom icon themes is, you know, customize an icon theme.
That being said, it's expected the default icon theme does little to nothing about customizing a third party icon. When I was involved (briefly) with the KDE VDG back when 5 was about to be launched I proposed a icon style that looked completely different of what Breeze looks right now - maybe something in between of what Oxygen looks like and Breeze looks like. But Jens Reutenberg told me it couldn't go in that direction since they needed to ship certain icons "as-is", like the Firefox one, so it was better to do something that could fit anything so those "special" icons wouldn't look out of place.
Some people like to diss on flat/minimalism styles but for some situations there is a reason they look that way.
It takes me at least 3 times as long to find what I need with these minimalist monochrome icons, though. I always opt to the more colorful ones, if possible.
Can't you just right click an icon, set it to whatever you want (including the original one), and then lock it so subsequent theme changes won't change it? DE people are moving in all the wrong directions :/
The submission title makes it a bigger deal than it is, the article clarifies that "The team reasoned that overriding another developer's branding is rude, and it also lacks the resources to maintain the icons as branding changes over time." and "Anyone who misses the old look is welcome to create a new icon theme and upload it to the KDE Store.". Nothing has really changed, especially not newsworthy.
I meant independent of this change about monochrome icon sets in general. Like in settings dialogues the menu on the left side. I'm fastest just going by the colors before I have parsed anything else. But yes, also the same applies in the context menu -> open with. So I welcome them not replacing the original app icons with monochrome ones. At first I read the news the wrong way around.
As I understand it from reading the original post, they are leaving the third party apps default icon. They're not overiding with monochrome icons. Bad title by a probable AI rewrite, please read the original KDE blog post linked elsewhere in the thread.
This is KDE's decision on their Breeze theme. Distributions can ship the icon set with third party icons if they want.
My workaround already was using Breeze, since it does the least modification compared to other themes available by default. Glad to see it continue in this direction.