Missing desktop icons after upgrading to Lubuntu 26.04

Published  |  1 minute read   |  98 views  |   Solaris  

After a recent upgrade of one of my Lubuntu desktops from 24.04 to 26.04 I've noticed that a number of icons are missing from a variety of locations. Namely, from my Desktop, from the lxqt-panel, within the file manager, and even within lxqt-config.

After a bit of troubleshooting:

  • Clearing cache locations,
  • Reinstalling icon theme packages,
  • Manually changing configuration files.

All the above without success, even trawling through online forums I didn't find an ideal solution.

So it was back to the drawing board — After some further research, it seems that icons in LXQt sessions are handled by lxqt-qtplugin. Without this plugin it seems that lxqt-panel, lxqt-config and others will show the symptoms I have.

The solution for me or so I thought was to simply reinstall the lxqt-menu-data and lxqt-qtplugin packages. However, this didn't resolve all of the symptoms I was seeing.

Finally, I came up with the following solution:

  • Reinstall the metapackage for LXQt, and also lxqt-panel, lxqt-menu-data and the cructial lxqt-qtpanel packages: 
    l2604$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall lxqt lxqt-panel lxqt-menu-data lxqt-qtplugin
  • Logout and back in to your LXQt session (possibly needing a reboot of your desktop).

The above brute-force maybe an overkill and there's probably a simpler solution, but I finally see icons where they're supposed to be.

Problem solved — Happy days :-)