Xfce Forum

omonk

Member

Registered: 2025-09-14

Posts: 1

In XFCE, how to make Steam tray icon follow Papirus-Light theme?

Hi, I’m having a small issue with the tray icons in XFCE.

In my setup, only the Steam tray icon shows up as a light-colored / grey icon, while all other icons look normal. No matter how I change the icon theme, Steam seems to always use its default grey icon, which makes the tray icon hard to read.
   
    DE: XFCE 4.18
    Steam: Flatpak version
    Icon theme: Papirus-Light
    distro:linuxmint 22.2

Is there any way to fix this so the Steam tray icon matches the others?

Thanks in advance!

Last edited by omonk (2025-09-14 16:53:41)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,191

Re: In XFCE, how to make Steam tray icon follow Papirus-Light theme?

Hello and welcome.

A couple of challenges here. The first is, that tray icons are displayed as they are received, meaning that Xfce only displays what it gets. Second challenge is that you are using flatpak and the icon coming directly from the flatpak. So to fix this issue, you need to edit the tray icon in the flatpak package.

Good news is, that it appears to be located at ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam/public called steam_tray_mono.png. Edit this file to recolor it and you will be good to go (probably need to restart Steam).

Also not sure what happens when the flatpak gets updated, it might just overwrite this file and you'll need to redo the edit again.

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ajgringo619

Member

Registered: 2024-06-09

Posts: 8

Re: In XFCE, how to make Steam tray icon follow Papirus-Light theme?

I've been fighting with the same issue with the Arch package version. I've got a solution, but I'm not sure if the one main step I took will mess things up in the long run:

First: create a new icon in, or copy another one to, the aforementioned location (mine was $HOME/.local/share/Steam/public).
Second (and this is the hack): prevent Steam from overwriting the file (sudo chattr +i /path/to/file)

Restart Steam. I got the usual Steam update window, but it did not crash or even complain about not being able to change the icon back.

EDIT: darn it, I did find a complaint from the Steam update process - please disregard.

Last edited by ajgringo619 (Today 00:15:56)