Solved Adwaita Icons Overwritten. How Do I Restore Them?

[Jack_Sparrow]

I wanted to install the Cinnamon Sounds, so I installed the mint-artwork package from the Linux Mint Repository in addition to these dependencies:
-mint-cursor-themes
-mint-x-icons
-mint-themes

Upon restart, the system changed all of my theme settings to Mint. I was able to change most of them back except Icons which seem to have been permanently overwritten as Mint, even if I specifically select Adwaita from the settings menu. Reinstalling adwaita-icon-theme does nothing. Any advice on how to get the Adwaita icons back?


======================EDIT===================================

More info about my distro:

Cinnamon Debian 12 (x64)

 

[GatorsFan]

Well there in is your problem you used Mint repositories on Debian and created a FrankenDebian - remove the cinnamon-sounds and the Mint dependencies and also remove the Mint repository and put everything back to Debian - if you want you may want to consider downloading LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) since it is designed to use the Mint Repositories whereas Debian is not

 

[Jack_Sparrow]

Well there in is your problem you used Mint repositories on Debian and created a FrankenDebian - remove the cinnamon-sounds and the Mint dependencies and also remove the Mint repository and put everything back to Debian - if you want you may want to consider downloading LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) since it is designed to use the Mint Repositories whereas Debian is not

Fortunately, I never added the actual Mint repositories, but rather, I downloaded the individual .deb packages and installed them. I already removed all of the packages I installed, but that didn't help solve the issue. I'm guessing only a full system reformat can fix the issue?

 

[Condobloke]

if you have Timeshift installed, that will revert the changes for you, providing you have a snapshot taken before you made the changes

 

[Fanboi]

Did you run gtk-update-icon-cache post install?

Check the directory /usr/share/icons/
If there is a directory called "Adwaita" and it contains the Adwaita icons, updating the icon cache will work.

If not, "Don't Panic"
I found this pack on Github, can "install" it locally:

GitHub - GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme: Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme

Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme - GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme

github.com

wget https://github.com/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
unzip master.zip
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/share/icons
cp adwaita-icon-theme-master/Adwaita $HOME/.local/share/icons/
cd $HOME/.local/share/icons/
gtk-update-icon-cache

*You may need to completely log out your graphical session and log back in again in all case (never happened to me, but hey, weird stuff happens on your machine)

Protip: if you can avoid it, do not install themes/icons/etc. Get them from <insert de>-look.org, example, xfce-look.org. They're all the same site and a trustworthy source of themes, icons, et al. Download icons and unzip them to $HOME/.local/share/icons and run gtk-update-icon-cache for each additiona/removal.
If you cannot avoid it, make sure you copy /usr/share/icons/ to $HOME/.local/share/icons/ to prevent future headaches.

Finally, to reiterate:
Do not create

a FrankenDebian

See: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

 

[Jack_Sparrow]

Did you run gtk-update-icon-cache post install?

Check the directory /usr/share/icons/
If there is a directory called "Adwaita" and it contains the Adwaita icons, updating the icon cache will work.

If not, "Don't Panic"
I found this pack on Github, can "install" it locally:

GitHub - GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme: Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme

Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme - GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme

github.com

wget https://github.com/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
unzip master.zip
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/share/icons
cp adwaita-icon-theme-master/Adwaita $HOME/.local/share/icons/
cd $HOME/.local/share/icons/
gtk-update-icon-cache

*You may need to completely log out your graphical session and log back in again in all case (never happened to me, but hey, weird stuff happens on your machine)

Protip: if you can avoid it, do not install themes/icons/etc. Get them from <insert de>-look.org, example, xfce-look.org. They're all the same site and a trustworthy source of themes, icons, et al. Download icons and unzip them to $HOME/.local/share/icons and run gtk-update-icon-cache for each additiona/removal.
If you cannot avoid it, make sure you copy /usr/share/icons/ to $HOME/.local/share/icons/ to prevent future headaches.

Finally, to reiterate:
Do not create

See: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

Thanks for all of the replies. I ended up reformatting the harddrive since I only had used Debian for about two weeks, and installing the Mint components caused other minor issues (such as the login screen background to be deleted). And yes, I definitely learned a valuable lesson about creating a FrandenDebian. With that being said, some helpful people over at Debian taught me how to browse installation packages for resources I want without actually installing the package. In this case, all I needed to do was right click on mint-artwork_1.8.9_all.deb, and select Open With>Archive Manager. From there, I could browse data.tar.xz/urs/share/mint-artwork/sounds, and copy/paste the .ogg files I wanted without doing a reckless installation. Thank you for all of your suggestions, and I've definitely learned my lesson!