Organising icons and themes

Would it be possible to organise icons in one place? (and possibly that would involves evaluating how to themes are ogranised)

Currently I have /usr/share/icons that seems to contain all system wide icons, except it contains icons related to plasma styles and window decorators that will have no effect if I overwrite them. I get similar behaviour if I use an icon set stored under $USER/.local/share/icons/

This is confusing, and I had to spend a good long time to figure out that any widget related to widget icons for example are set by a separate theme system and for users are stored actually under $USER/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme.

On top of this, for example an installed cursor icon theme is stored under $USER/.icons

My point being, icons and themes are spammed everywhere. While I really love the idea of separate categories for cursors, window decorators and other system wide icons, I think it would be better to store all of these under a single ‘theme’ folder under $USER/.local/share that contains every icon/theme in an organised manner, that one could just grab and apply it to an other system if needs to be.

This is not possible. Kde follows freedesktop.org specification for this kind of folder structure. All desktop environment follows this specification. Currently plasma theme can ship with custom icons for panel etc but If I understand currently in Plasma 6, plasma theme will use your icon theme for more visual consistency.

Yup, @mika is correct… as explained in the “Icons in Plasma Styles” section in the following blog post: https://pointieststick.com/2023/07/26/what-we-plan-to-remove-in-plasma-6/

As for the different locations for the various visual elements, I think its the price we pay for such a customizable and modular platform. Hopefully the new implementation will clear things up a bit.