Getting rid of Gtk Theme icon warnings

Intro

A recurring problem is this type of message:

Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'edit-clear' for stock:

What is this kind of problem and what to do about it?

Refs

The problem

So what to do?

Apparently, the problem is related to a decision of the Gnome folks to eliminate support for symbolic stock icons. Which means that older applications will not find their icons anymore. Apart from the obvious stupidity of such a decision disrespecting users, the question is what to do about it.

Things that may have an effect

After a change of the icon theme, it may be useful to sudo update-icon-caches /usr/share/icons/*. It is possible to see the loaded icons (sudo apt install gtk-3-examples then run gtk3-icon-browser)

Maybe I should install sudo apt install gnome-icon-theme-symbolic. I tried it, but nothing seems to happen.

Maybe I can find a better icon theme? I opened an application with gtk+ icon theme warnings, and with that on screen I selected other icon themes. This gives some success:

• Theme Humanity-xx is OK
• Theme Ubuntu-Mono-xx is OK
• all other themes (adwaita,faba,lubuntu,moka,nuovext) have problems.

Conclusion

I settled for Humanity-Dark.