Do your app icons in Discover look ugly and pixellated? If so, you’re probably a Kubuntu user. Every user of a recent Kubuntu version unfortunately sees horrid low-resolution icons in Discover. It’s very unpleasant.

Today I helped drive an investigation and resolution for this issue. Here’s the good news: it’ll be fixed in the upcoming Kubuntu 18.04, and you can fix it for yourself, today! Here’s how.

Run the following terminal commands: sudo sed -i "s/hidpi/large/" /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/60plasma-discover sudo apt update sudo appstreamcli refresh-cache --force

Restart Discover, if it’s running

Ta-daa! Pretty, high-resolution icons:

This turned out to be a bug in how Discover was packaged in Debian. Ubuntu was re-using the Debian Appstream configuration packaging, and that packaging was erroneously downloading HiDPi versions of small icons instead of large icons. This illustrates an eternal principle in software: the price of 3rd-party and upstream dependencies is eternal communication. When every layer of software is built on top of another layer provided by someone else, communication is mandatory; when the people responsible for each layer don’t talk to one another regularly, bugs creep in. Once all parties were talking to one another in the same (virtual) room, a fix materialized literally within minutes.

Thankfully, this bug has been squashed, and Kubuntu users will once again see pretty app icons.

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