So I've got 2 basically identical installs of Debian on 2 different laptops. The one, I installed LibreOffice from sid, and all the toolbar icons dissappeared. The other, identical package installs, and it has the toolbars. To test, I purged libreoffice and autoremove --purge all the dependencies. Install libreoffice (5.2.7)from stretch. Icons there. Installed from stretch-backports (5.3.5rc1), icons there. installed from sid, no icons. I've verified it's set to show icons in customize toolbars. Everything still works, just no icons.

Again, purged & autoremove --purge, then did a find / -iname 'libreoffice*' -delete, install from backports again, icons. Upgrade again to sid, no icons. Meanwhile, my other machine simply has icons with 5.4 from sid. No way I see to set an icon theme in libreoffice other than 1 icon at a time.

I've installed from the Libreoffice website for now, but I really don't like doing it that way, I'd much prefer installing through apt. But I'm out of ideas what might be causing my issues.

Sounds like a bug to me. From your description it sounds like the API is missing something or maybe misconfigured somehow.

I don't like doing it that way either because it most likely isn't going to get the update it needs.

Had it been my system I would of purged and used autoremove as you did.

When you upgraded to sid is there a chance your missing packages/lib's?

It's a bug in Fedora and Arch Linux.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1334915
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/53597

Commands on this page for Debian Testing (not sure if that will work)
https://listarchives.libreoffice.org.../msg48915.html

So I reinstalled my desktop with Debian due to Fedora 26 being not stable, and I'm wondering if some dependency of libreoffice got updated after installing on my first laptop. The desktop does the same behavior as my laptop...but the FIRST machine installed on still works. I'm thinking some package was updated and the new version is broken, but not so much that it won't work, only that it won't allow the icons to display on the toolbars if it's newly installed. But if upgraded from a prior build of the file, it'll still work.

Only a theory, but the fact that both new installs have no icons and only text on toolbars, while the old install works...seems quite possible.

It's possible that a dependency of libreoffice did get updated after your install on the first laptop.

I'm just not sure why you still don't have icons. Is the old install version 5.2.7?

All 5.4.0 (sid). 5.2.7 (stable) or 5.3.5 (backports) are completely fine on both machines where 5.4.0 have issues. So it quite literally is ONLY 5.4.0 that's having issues. I can purge it install 5.2.7 and all toolbars have icons again. I'm just gonna chalk it up to sid being sid, and check back occassionally to see if something is fixed. Not that big a deal to purge it and reinstall an older version if it's not fixed yet.

This has probably nothing to do with the problem, for which I apologise, but personally for my Oxygen icons I install libreoffice-style-oxygen and then switch to it with Tools->Options->Libre Office->View->Icon size and style: Oxygen.

Might be worth a go to see if you can stimulate the sid version into displaying something.

Worth a shot. Could even be that there is no libreoffice-style-{} packages automatically installed on those. Definitely worth a look...

And of course I brought the laptop to work that it IS working on...

Per hydrurga's post,

I'd say it's a libreoffice setting that is fudged in sid. Perhaps also a missing package. But it could be a bug.

Yeah, at some point tonight I should have a chance to look to see if there's any style packages installed on one of the ones that doesn't work. There's the style-galaxy installed on the working one.

Looks like it was a configuration issue with the 5.4.0 package. The icon style was set to Automatic (Helpimg) which doesn't have any icons apparently. I was able to switch to galaxy and I also installed oxygen and either of those work.

Also 5.4.0 is now in backports...