Fans of the Papirus icon theme will be pleased to hear there’s a new update – the first since May 2025.

Papirus’s first update in 2026 (the tardiness of which its maintainer, Serhii Yeremenko, apologises for) brings more than 80 new or updated icons spanning applications, games and user-interface icons, plus new file-mimetypes and revised symlinks.

Frequent updates are why Papirus icons are popular with Linux users, and they have been for many years. Often, Linux icon packs debut with a big bang; launch momentum fuels a couple of revisions, but then things go quiet as people and maintainers move on.

Papirus has been going since 2013 and has been updated periodically ever since.

Maintaining an icon theme requires constant effort. New apps emerge, brand updates, packaging format quirks and name changes need to be accounted for, while UI updates may expect newer symbolic icons to be available.

One gap in coverage often spoils the overall look.

Among the new icons added (or receiving symlink changes) in the Papirus 202608 update:

Gaming-icon coverage expands with icons added for AssaultCube Reloaded, Black Desert, Cities Skylines 2, Team Fortress 2 (Classified), Overwatch and Hollow Knight: Silksong among others.

Mimetypes and file icon coverage also loop in more ROM files, including those used by Nintendo DS emulators.

Other icon changes benefit users on Cinnamon, LxQt and Xfce desktops, with the latter gaining updated symlinks to provide relevant icons for the WhiskerMenu, Notes, SysTray and XKB panel applets.

Papirus v202608 provides updated icons for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and Community edition, PyCharm and its Community edition and the open-source reference manager Zotero, among others. Kotlin and project README files also receive revised mimetypes.

The entire C‑family file‑icon set was also updated. Mimetypes for e.g., .c, .h and .m use a consistent text style with page colours derived from the official logos (but colours are used for ‘Objective’ C to help distinguish them.

How to install Papirus icons

Download the latest Papirus icons release from GitHub, then manually move the extracted folder to the relevant location (~/.local/icons, off the top of my head).

If you’re on Ubuntu, Linux Mint or similar, you may find it easier to install Papirus using the Papirus icons PPA. The PPA packages the latest release for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS thru 26.04 LTS.

To add the PPA, open your terminal and run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:papirus/papirus

sudo apt install papirus-icon-theme

Once installed, you can the change icon theme to Papirus. On GNOME Shell, install the GNOME Tweaks app to do it (sudo apt install gnome-tweaks), while other desktop environments usually provide a built in method for changing icon theme.

Worth noting: apps which are sandboxed, i.e., snaps or flatpaks, don’t always “inherit” the system-level icon theme.