I am not sure if this belongs here *but* This bugreport is for the recent GIT version of Xfce4 (So referring to the newest possible checkout and build of Xfce4) Quite often I have the issue that after loading up Xfce4 that the icon theme that I have chosen is not applied! What I get is some rudimentar icons or missing icons. For example: I have compiled (buildfarm) and installed new version of Xfce4 on my Fedora 26. I don't use the gnome-icon theme at all. Only the elementary-icons for Xfce4. Every now and then (say 70 out of 100 loads) the Icons are applied properly. But the remaining 30 times of loading Xfce4, the icon theme is not applied on startup. Only showing empty or old icons (like some rudimentary shapes of icons). After logging out and logging back in again, the icons are applied correctly. I am not sure whether this belongs to xfce4-settings, xfconf or xfdesktop. But since this applies to all Xfce4 related core programs and also panel icons, I therefore conclude that this may be a xfce4-settings issue (maybe timing or so). It would be nice to review this and throw an eye on this situation. In case I can tar up my entire xfce4 configs so you can test this... Would be nice to get fixed before 4.14 release.
Created attachment 7434 shot1.jpg This picture shows no applied icon theme after booting up linux and logging into the xfce4 session. No icons from the icon theme within the panel, desktop, panel plugins, or application menu.
Created attachment 7435 shot2.jpg Here you can see that the icon theme is properly applied once I logged out of xfce4 and then in again. Simple log out and log in is enough.
xfsettingsd --replace solves the issue until it shows up again on some random reboot into the desktop.
I would like to address, that this issue still exists. Been having it nearly every day for about 2-3 months now. When issuing 'xfsettingsd --replace' the icon theme is loaded up correctly. Though I am getting this within the terminal (xfsettingsd:1025): xfsettingsd-WARNING **: Property "/Gdk/WindowScalingFactor" has an unsupported type "guint". I am not sure whether this might be related as in xfsettingsd aborting further processing. It would be nice, if someone may look this up. I also like to address, that LC_* is not set on my system. Only LANG=en_US.utf8. I mention this because someone applied some xsettings patches recently because xsettings tend to abort on empty LC_* variables... System Fedora 27
Please test with xfce4-session 4.13.2 or newer. https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/commit/?id=0a915310582803296fbfb075e1ea1c045b20bfcc
Closing.