Black icons in file chooser in some apps

Aha, good sleuthing! Doing some Google searching for Qt5 black icons then came up with this comment on the Debian mailing lists from @rikmills , one of the Kubuntu maintainers: Re: Black folder icons in Dolphin

The reason is that the kf6-breeze-icon-theme which replaced the kf5 version has some changes which are not supported by the Qt5/KF5 kiconthemes library. You are also likely to see black folder icons in the file picker of any Qt5/KF5 app when you enlarge the icon view enough to see coloured folders.

Some solutions might be:

  • downgrade to the KF5 breeze icon theme package and put that on hold with apt until Qt6/KF6 apps are ready. - as some have done, copy locally the old icon theme so that takes precedence. - persuade devs to revert the offending upstream change in the debian packaging, again until no longer required.

Hope that helps.