Linux Mint is the distribution of Linux that most people try first, when they’ve grown tired of Microsoft Windows and want to try a free alternative. As such, it has quickly become the most popular Linux distribution (“distro”) available (which is saying something, since there are hundreds). It’s built on another massively popular distro called Ubuntu, but has more stuff pre-installed and configured for immediate use. Also, with a taskbar & start menu at the bottom of the screen, it looks & feels relatively similar to the Windows that most people are familiar with – which can make it hard to think outside of the box that you’ve been working in your whole life. 

I was one of those Windows emigrants. It started when my wife’s old & slow netbook needed to be replaced, but we didn’t want to spend the money on it, so just for fun I installed Mint, since I’d heard Linux works great on older/slower hardware. Sure enough, her netbook was reinvigorated, and she continues to use it today – a few years later! (For a more detailed version of the story, along with stats and specs, take a look at a post I made about the topic a few years ago at Leftcall.com.) Now every computer in our house runs various flavors of Mint. (You can get flavors specific to your situation. Two editions worth noting are: one called Cinnamon has fancy effects to run on newest machines, and there’s a somewhat stripped-down version called XFCE that runs great on the slowest machines (I noticed a speed increase after migrating my wife’s netbook from the middle-of-the-road MATE to the more appropriate (for her situation) XFCE a year or two ago)).

So, with all these machines running Mint, we occasionally like to customize things. Call me crazy, but as a lifelong Windows user, I had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to do something that should be so obvious: Change an icon on a desktop shortcut. In Windows, you just always right-clicked and chose “Properties” and then there would be a nice big “Change Icon” button to click on. No problem.  There is no such button in Linux, and I spent more minutes than I care to admit messing around with this, looking for a button, before finally figuring it out. So, to hopefully save someone else a few minutes of feeling like a moron, I happily admit to my head-slapping stupidity, and share the solution here with you. :)

All you have to do to change an icon is: Right-click the shortcut to the program or folder, and go to Properties:

As the screenshot above says, you then need to click on the existing icon to change it.

After that, navigate to /usr/share/icons/.

From there, there are lots of places to look for replacements, but I usually start in /Mint-X/apps/scalable/. (Note: The Mint 17.2 update removed the icons that used to be in the scalable directory, so now you have to get them from /Mint-X/apps/48/ instead.)

Sometimes, when you’ve done something a certain way for so long, it can be hard to consider there may be an even easier alternative!

Happy customizing!
–Steve