Unfriendly non-usability change in GNOME

I thought this was a bug in gtk but it turns out to be a usability feature introduced in GNOME - all the menu and button icons are disabled. Yuk!

I liked buttons and menus with icons, I've spent a lot of time writing the code to put customised icons on buttons (it is helpful to show an icon on a button that only exists in one app and which does an action specific to that one app to help the user know what the button will do - how else is the user to know without making the button label twenty lines long?) and it's weird if some show up and some do not. Plus the disabled menu icons were only ever partially disabled which was even more confusing. A picture is worth a thousand words - if some pictures aren't any good it's not reason to ditch every picture regardless of quality! Even worse to make it a default that cannot be turned back on cleanly.

The fix involves a partial fix in the System Appearance Interface tab and a hack in gconf-editor to complete the fix.

I now have icons on buttons and on menus, despite GNOME trying to be "helpful". I'll be updating a few screenshots that inadvertently ended up with naked buttons.

How long will it be before a package includes a GConf snippet that enables icons again just because the app is hard to use with all buttons and menu items looking the same? Heck, I might even do it in one of my own packages.