Meet Hedera, a new Linux icon pack inspired by one from the (rather distant) past.
Specifically, the Tango project.
The Tango desktop project aimed to create a comprehensive and consistent set of icon guidelines for use by open-source software.
And it was pretty successful. Many app developers adopted it, and it shipped by default (in one form or another) in various desktop environments and Linux distributions.
The Humanity icon set that Ubuntu still uses is based off of Tango icons.
So What Happened?
Tango fell out of favour around the same time that more modern-looking icon sets, like elementary, Humanity and Faenza, became popular.
But there’s still a naive, unassuming, and non-flashy quality to the Tango icons, even today.
And that’s precisely what the new Hedera icon set is hoping to embody.
Hedera — Like Tango! Icons For 2016
‘Hedera is a classic icon theme in the spirit of Tango’
Hedera is described by its author as “a classic icon theme in the spirit of Tango!”.
And it really is.
It features bright, colourful icons without distinct borders. Icons are small and designed to render quickly.
The pack features ‘4200 common icons in most common sizes’ and has been tested with KDE3/4, Plasma 5, Xfce 4.12, LXQt and LXDE, MATE & Enlightenment. It hasn’t been tested with Unity, so if you plan on trying it out, bear in mind that your mileage may vary.
As icon packs go Hedera is not the easiest one to get running — but then neither was Linux back in the era it draws its aesthetic from.
To get a taste of Hedera on your own desktop you can head to the GitHub project page and follow the steps in the readme. Do give attention to the bugs and limitations listed in the FAQ, and note the workarounds needed on some desktop environments.
This isn’t not the sort of theme you can sit on the fence about: you’ll either love it, or hurriedly reach for something to catch your melting eyes in… Which are you?