Icon scaling broken with KDE Frameworks 6.23 [Upstream]

[irasponsible]

This is an upstream issue in KDE Frameworks, but I'm reporting this here because other users coming across the issue might think it's a Chicago95 issue instead of KDE.

Upstream Report with more details: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517534

As of Frameworks 6.23, KDE will now use an SVG icon if it exists, even if there's an appropriate-size PNG icon (previously, it was doing the opposite, but that was far less noticeable in practice). Instead of using a 16/22/32px icon, it'll use the "scalable" (which are usually 48px) icon scaled down to 16/22/32px. Because Chicago95 is 'pixel art', the result looks blurred and messy.

A temporary workaround is to comment out all of the "scalable" folders from index.theme (functionally just removing them). Not ideal, but it turns out they weren't being used properly anyway.

I noticed this with my own spinoff, but it happens with Chicago95 icons as well.

[irasponsible]

A fix (revert to the old behaviour) has been merged and should be in the next version of Frameworks, but it'll probably come up again - the fix was because the upstream SVG renderer needs work, not because it breaks icons like Chicago95's.

[grabz8]

The ultimate solution is to just mass convert all the pixelart to SVG (using colored square tags as pixels). Then it will be set in stone as pixelated and won't blur when scaled.

[irasponsible]

Downside of that is a massively increased file size, and in theory it shouldn't be needed if DEs do the right thing (select the proper icon for the size regardless of filetype). If that's the preferred solution though, here's a script I put together to do that conversion. It's a bit slow to run - especially if there's icons in full-colour or with opacity from being poorly squished - but it tries multiple things to get the file size down as much as possible.