Use SVG icons instead of PNG

[Milan]

Ioannis Nousias wrote:
> I can see how that works in static/specific icon sizes, but considering 
> the numerous visual effects we get on our modern distros these days, in 
> most cases we are dealing with dynamically changing icons. Cairo-dock is 
> one example, several compiz plugins (like shift-switcher, scale or even 
> zoom) are some more. And with 'resolution independence' coming in the 
> near future, I can't see how PNG could 'survive'. You would need a 
> fairly high resolution PNG as a bases to avoid aliasing. And as you 
> said, resizing a pixmap isn't necessarily less computationally intensive 
> than rendering vector graphics. (well, it depends I guess)
>   
Here SVG would be required, but if you use composite graphics, you
accept to spend GPU power on it, and so that's not really a problem. In
this case SVG is the best and only solution, anyway.
Resolution independence should not be problematic, icons will still have
a fixed size and so PNG will be right.
> <snip>
>> To sum up, yes, having SVG icons for every app would be good, and no, it
>> does not hurt performance. The best to do is reporting bugs upstream,
>> that should not take them too much time to fix.
>>   
>>     
> out of the 273 .desktop files in my /usr/share/applications, 31 use explicitly .png suffix in their 'Icon' field, 7 use .svg, 8 .xpm and the rest don't specify a suffix. Where should I file a bug report for this? It would be cumbersome to file a bug report for each application that does not conform to the standard.
>   
Every trivial bug that affects so many packages is a pain to solve. You
can still create an unique report on Launchpad, and mark it as affecting
several packages: this is faster to do and allows to see the progress of
the work. But many times, you have to report a bug upstream for each
project too so that developers know about it, so it can be a really
boring work.

At least, reporting bugs for a few of the most common applications would
help much, many other apps are only configuration tools or so, and don't
really need an eye-candy launcher (at least this can wait).