How to Change Start Menu Icon in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Want to change the ‘Show Applications’ dot grid icon in the dock panel of Ubuntu 20.04 Gnome Desktop?

The start menu dot grid icon relies on the view-app-grid-symbolic.svg icon. For default Yaru icon theme, it’s located in /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/actions.

To replace the icon, open terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard, then do following steps one by one.

1.) Make a backup of the original icon file:

cd /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/actions/ && sudo cp view-app-grid-symbolic.svg view-app-grid-symbolic.svg.bak

2.) Grab a SVG icon from web. In the case, I downloaded this ubuntu logo svg.

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NOTE: it must be a .svg icon file.

3.) Copy (or move) your .svg to replace the start menu icon:

sudo cp /path/to/your/svg /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/actions/view-app-grid-symbolic.svg

In my case the command is:

sudo cp ~/Downloads/ubuntu-icon.svg /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/actions/view-app-grid-symbolic.svg

4.) Finally apply changes by pressing Alt+F2, type r in pup-up ‘Run a command’ box, and hit Enter to restart Gnome.

To restore changes, simply copy back the backup file you did in step 1 by running command:

cd /usr/share/icons/Yaru/scalable/actions/ && sudo cp view-app-grid-symbolic.svg.bak view-app-grid-symbolic.svg