I’ve been taking a break from KDE to see how the Unity 7 desktop was progressing. Turns out, it’s coming along nicely.
However, one feature they have not added is the ability to change the icon for the Dash component. This is something that’s a user exposed option in KDE, but Canonical’s guys appear to have the same “Everyone Do It Our Way” mindset as the Gnome devs, and don’t expose a simple mechanism to change the icon when theming your desktop.
But, there’s still a pretty simple solution. You just replace their icon file with your own in the /usr/share/unity/icons directory (after backing up their original file), like so:
cd /usr/share/unity/icons sudo mv launcher_bfb.png launcher_bfb.png.original sudo cp ~/my_png_file.png launcher_bfb.png
Replace “~/my_png_file.png” with the path to the PNG you wish to use for the new icon. That’s all there is to it.
The only thing left to do after those commands is to log out and back in so that Unity will read the new file when the launcher restarts.
If at any time you want to go back to the original Ubuntu logo as your Dash icon, just go copy the backup we made over your custom PNG file:
cd /usr/share/unity/icons sudo cp launcher_bfb.png.original launcher_bfb.png