Hardcode-Tray VS themer

not an easy topic, because each application has its own icon and not all of them respect aspect ratio, the best thing in this case is to use hardcode-tray which replaces third party app icons with properly spaced icons, the only problem is that not all third party apps use an icon stored somewhere, unfortunately for those you have to change the source and recompile

You are looking for Hardcode-Tray , it can replace icons using ones from icon themes. Sadly enough, not all applications can be "fixed", but the one you mention (discord) can :).

it seems that GNOME doesn't support the tray since 3.26. You can find out more here. I believe that this link also takes you to a project called Hardcode-Tray, which they describe above. I suggest you give it a read.

Instead of trying to figure out the icon paths and replacing them manually you can use this https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/Hardcode-Tray, it can pull icons from regular icon themes, unfortunately, it only supports a short list of popular apps currently and some can't be fixed (like zoom) and is up to the program developers to fix/support that.

I love the Papirus icon them and want to keep it going in Mint 21.1 Cinnamon along with a mod I found called Hardcode Tray: https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/Hardcode-Tray

This can fix a lot of icons. Last time I installed it from aur, it couldn't fix some of the icons. Compiling from source fixed the issue though.

I'd say it not so hard to keep icons intact. How many tray apps do you have? Five? Maybe ten? You can write a script using HardcodeTray to override the icons for every app in the list. And if you like zero click solution, you can make a hook for your package manager to overwrite the hardcoded icons on updates. The only thing that's left is to keep overrides list up to date. Doesn't take that much of an effort to do so.

As mentioned above, the Discord desktop app uses some hardcoded 24x24 tray icons which look horrible at any sane screen resolution. Things like Hardcode-Tray exist, but don't work out of the box with NixOS as far as I can tell, so I made a home-manager activation script for it. It's not perfect by any means, but it seems to work well enough.

Switching to a different theme(like papirus) might help, there is also hardcode tray fix for it, though it might be overkill.

As for the system tray, it's a little bit harder than that. If you are lucky, your app may have settings to configure tray icon (e.g. pidgin). In some cases icon is compiled into a binary. If you still want to change a tray icon there is a solution that modifies a binary. The drawback is that modification will be rolled back on package update. The best way is to combine your overrides into a script and run it after update.