Is it time Ubuntu binned off one of its most visible icons?
Designers working on the community-led Yaru icon theme are currently trash-talking the trash icon (in a constructive way, of course), and a proposed replacement is looking far from rubbish.
Not that everyone cares about icons. They’re just part of the digital furniture to some. Discussions on continuity, colours, motifs and metaphors, optical proportions, scalability is boring.
To others, good design matters. A clear and coherent UI improves usability, reduces cognitive burden (“is that icon for the tool I need?”) and helps convey the operating system’s identity and purpose.
Which is my wordy way of saying: no matter which circle of that Venn diagram you put yourself in, there is an overlap.
Yaru has Ubuntu’s default icon set since 2018 and has improved and reworked many of its icons in the years since – the trash icon being the latest to undergo a critical rethink.
Ubuntu shows the trash icon (or ‘wastebasket’ or ‘recycle bin’ or whatever else you know it as) on the dock by default, so it’s a icon more people see and interact with than others.
So why change it?
Well, it’s changed a few times over the years, but with a grating inconsistency: the full-colour icon on the dock doesn’t look that much like a bin.
The current task icon is a bin with a small ‘postbox’ style opening, inside of which there’s nothing (if trash is empty) or a stack of shuffled papers (if not empty). It’s a well made icon that echos an actual type of bin — but is that motif ‘heard’?
If you took the famous recycling logo off the front and showed it to a stranger, they’d probably think it was a postbox when empty, or a sleeve for holding documents when full.
There’s another (minor) niggle: the full-colour icon doesn’t match the simpler, ‘symbolic’ version, which is used in the file manager sidebar. There’s no hard rule which states they must match, but I’m sure the aesthetically particularly would prefer an associated motif.
Designer ~ochi12, who lent his talents to redesigning icons in the 25.04 cycle, reopened a discussion on the Yaru GitHub to improve the icon. The Yaru team responded, and a few recycled ideas later, a more traditional trash can is in the mix.
The icon you see above is the result of several iterations. It’s now more ‘tub’ like with crumbled ‘contents’ (when it has some) and using a 3D perspective (which is a bit out of kilter with other Yaru icons, which tend to be head-on).
Of course, nothing is finalised, and further discussions and design iterations are likely as the new icon gets thrashed out.
But hopefully, the Questing Quokka will be taking a tidier-looking trash can on its travels when Ubuntu 25.10 is released on October 9 2025.