Generic Wayland icon specifically in alt-tab switcher and title bar for many Flatpaks, but not the Task Manager

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Hi, I’ve noticed there has been a pretty stubborn issue over the past 4 years with a lot of Flatpak apps showing a generic “W” icon in certain elements where they shouldn’t. In particular, I’ve noticed some apps that do show the correct icon in the Task Manager on Plasma’s default panel, but not anywhere else. You can usually tell by looking at the alt-tab switcher for a given app. For instance:

  • Librewolf (a Firefox fork)
  • Localsend (a Flutter app, I think?)
  • Tor Browser from the Tor Browser Launcher

There are also some big apps that still have the Wayland icon in the Task Manager, in addition to all of the other places I mentioned. These include Libreoffice, Calibre, and SoundConverter (which is a GTK3 app).

Why is it that some apps have this problem only partially fixed? And what does it take to completely fix it so that the correct icon shows in all places?

(also yes, I have read Fixing Wayland taskbar icons - Nico’s blog, but this article is specifically about taskbar icons)

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The article is about taskbar icons, but it’s generally applicable to everything (although it’s for Qt apps.) It’s the app’s fault by not setting some part of their desktop file metadata correctly.

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Do you know of any general steps for fixing the metadata in a given app, or does it vary wildly by toolkit? (wondering since I’m interested in making PRs for each app to fix the issue)

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It varies wildly by toolkit, unfortunately. Nico has a good example of what to do for Qt, but I wouldn’t know how to do it for GTK for example.