Where the heck are icon themes stored?

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1

I am on NixOS and trying the Air theme. I really like the idea of revamping it and bringing a more vibrant and fun desktop!

I wanted to have a look at the icons in detail, but I couldnt find them

  • in the oxygen gitlab repo
  • in my nix store (even though there were many occurrences of the regular dolphin icon
  • anywhere in my home, using kfind (Search for org.kde.dolphin or dolphin, filtering by images)

They are not in ~/.local/share/icons, not in ~/.local/share/plasma anywhere.

They are preinstalled as part of my system so they should be somewhere.

Meanwhile, the regular dolphin icons are in /yp5iwkc8nis7laxg7rahb8b2272d0yza-dolphin-26.04.1/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/ for example.

2

On my system, system-wide icons are in /usr/share/icons/
I have no idea how Nix does things, but I’d wager that <your-weird-long-string-dolphin -26.04.1>/ might be analogous to /usr/, though it probably is specific to Dolphin?

Screenshot20260604213256
Screenshot20260604213256728Ă—470 21.1 KB

3

from my notes:

~/.local/share/plasma/look-and-feel/      # Global Theme, Splash Screen
~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/       # Plasma Style
~/.local/share/color-schemes/             # Colors
~/.local/share/aurorae/                   # Windows Decorations
~/.local/share/icons/                     # Icons
~/.icons                                  # Cursors
/usr/share/sddm/themes                    # SDDM
~/.config/kvantum/                        # kvantum themes

but these would be for user installed themes from the Get New… button.

for built-in themes i would look in /usr/share/icons

4

These are LOCAL folders, not SYSTEM folders.

/usr/share/ is home to many system directories…
/usr/share/icons/oxygen/ lives there.

If you want to create, or edit, then you should copy that folder to a local directory like ~/.local/share/icons

5

I was stupid, of course they are systemwide so in the nix store in that case

cd /nix/store
fd "oxygen-icons"

ra5wflp52gyliw9ir91nvrp1pv5xqgpg-nixos/nixos/pkgs/kde/misc/oxygen-icons/
p6lqiyz07sm8qkxi2nwdfxwhb47i37ad-nixos/nixos/pkgs/kde/misc/oxygen-icons/
w3nchhy5xh8g3y9nl2ckw6wzifpr97d7-nixos/nixos/pkgs/kde/misc/oxygen-icons/
...

and there they are

on NixOS everything is isolated into each “package” to keep the system clean