While testing install media for the Debian 13.7 point release, I noticed
that in the main menu of a freshly-installed Cinnamon desktop (test-case
022 in https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianCD/ReleaseTesting/Trixie_r7),
the Recent Files menu entry has what appears to be the "icon missing" icon.

To reproduce:
* Install Debian 13 with Cinnamon desktop
* Open the main menu (bottom left corner)

Expected result:
* I expected that the Cinnamon task would come with a default theme that
  has coverage for all icon names required by the Cinnamon desktop
  environment

Actual result:
* In the second column (mostly apps by category), the last entry is
  "Recent Files" with an icon that doesn't suggest recent files with any
  metaphor that is obvious to me (a white page with the bottom right
  corner folded, containing a rectangle with a black gradient).
  I think it's the fallback icon that GTK uses when there is no suitable icon?

Looking at Preferences → Themes, it seems like this version of Cinnamon
defaults to the old GNOME icon theme (gnome-icon-theme) rather than
having its own icon theme. Some other themes are preinstalled (mate,
menta, ContrastHigh) but none of them seem to have an icon for this menu
entry either.

I haven't checked whether forky/sid still has this issue.

Hi Simon, and thanks for the report — your diagnosis is right, and it is
a real bug.

The menu applet asks for `folder-recent`, a name outside the freedesktop
Icon Naming
Specification that only the Mint-X and Mint-Y icon themes provide, which
is why upstream
never sees it fail. No theme available in trixie has it, `gnome`,
`mate`, `Adwaita` and
`ContrastHigh` included, hence the GTK fallback icon.

In unstable the default configuration no longer shows it, by a different
route: since 6.6
the menu applet uses symbolic category icons by default, mapping the name to
`xsi-folder-recent-symbolic` from xapp-symbolic-icons, a package that
does not exist in
trixie. It still shows with "Use symbolic icons for categories" turned
off, so the
underlying bug is there too.

On the default theme having full coverage: it was changed from `gnome`
to `mate` in
cinnamon-desktop 6.4.2-1, since gnome-icon-theme is scheduled for
removal (#1103556), and
mate-icon-theme covers noticeably more than Adwaita 50 does nowadays.
But no theme fixes a
name that is outside the specification, and pulling in a ~120 MB icon
theme as a dependency
for a handful of icons would be the wrong trade, especially for minimal
installations.

I checked every icon name used by the shell, the applet/desklet
metadata, the settings
modules and the .desktop files against those themes. Besides this one,
only three fail:
`application-default-icon` (windows with no application icon — missing
on Mint-Y too),
`gnome-panel-launcher` (panel launchers with no icon), and the
`keyboard-*-filled-symbolic` pair of the new virtual keyboard, which no
theme has at all.

My patch for upstream asks for a GIcon with a list of names rather than
a single one,
keeping the current name first — so nothing changes on Mint-X or Mint-Y,
which I verified —
with a specification name as the fallback: `folder-recent` then
`document-open-recent`,
`gnome-panel-launcher` then `cinnamon-panel-launcher`,
`application-default-icon` then
`application-x-executable`.

Thanks again,
Fabio

Control: tags -1 + upstream

Thanks, that seems like a good approach to solving this.

     smcv