like AndydeCleyre mentioned it works that way however keep in mind that icons in plasma 5 is kind of weirdi would call it broken for example plasma icons do not use your systems xdg icon theme as fallbackthey always use the default breeze theme as fallback so to use the same icon theme on plasma and qtgtkkdeetc you have duplicate the your whole xdg theme in plasmadesktopthemeicons there is no real benefit from png since to make them display correctly you still have to create them pixelperfecteg a 22 px svg scaled to 16 px will not look better than a 22 px png scaled to 16 px due all the different editors and standards svgs are not the easiest format to create fileseg sk 1 svgs are often incompatible to inkscape svgs , same goes for illustrator , corel or xara svgs . svgs are often bigger than optimized png files , inconsistent due all the different editors and renderers SVGs are never a good choice to theme something in qt , since qt has terrible svgs supportno masks , no clips , it doesnt support all ways svg does eg fails at some gradients in short its missing everything that makes SVG greatif you really want to do this the is cuttlefishpart of the plasma sdk which will display all icons available in plasma . And remember to create all icons in inkscape and follow strictly SVG tiny 1 . 2 !