Some themes used by Xfce aren't very thorough with icons by a long shot. Tango and Adwaita from my experience seem to cover almost everything to be thorough enough.

If you have icon issues use one of those themes. One should have an icon for Pulse.

The issue has nothing to do with the icon theme. The plugin ships with the needed icons (although some people complain that they don't look right with a given theme, but what else is new?)

The problem is the the Xfce environment is mixing GTK+2 and GTK+3 programs, and it's difficult to integrate those together seamlessly.

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True, but then again when has GTK made sense as of late?

Yes, it looks better to revert that patch and looking forward to XFCE 4.14 (Blog, Porting rules and Roadmap).

Hopefully the GTK+3 port of XFCE will not make things more worse. At least the GTK+3 based pulseaudio-plugin-issue should be fixed then

Anyway, for now i patched the themes i'm using to get the correct background.

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Yeah until GTK+4 breaks it all over again.

You don't have to wait for GTK+4: GTK+3.20 did already break things like themes. Some themes do now include versioned themes, like themes/gtk-3.0, themes/gtk-3.18 and/or themes/gtk-3.20. And for breeze-gtk >= 5.6.95 you now have to specify for which GTK version you want to build the theme. So... a theme for GTK+2 and GTK+3 is not enough, you need themes for GTK+2, GTK+3, GTK+3.18 and GTK+3.20. And in the near future you also need themes for GTK+4.0 and maybe GTK+4.6. Horrible job for theme designers. Of course all these changes are made to make things easier.

Hey guys! Guys! In Panel >> Appearance >> Background/Style, by default it is

And as we all know, that doesn't work. However, if you choose,

and then set the panel's color yourself, then pulseaudio plugin will go along with whatever color you choose. It's still not the system style, and it will still take some messing around to get it to match the system style, but there's no modifying of gtk .css files involved (except what the Panel window does in your name), no replacing of icons. No expanding your theme to work with gtk3. Really, nothing complicated or Linux-y at all!

This is why I love xfce.

So again:
Go to Panel >> Appearance, find where it says: "None (use system style)" change it to: "Solid Color" and then try to pick a color that matches your theme. Happy hunting!

This only changes plugin background. So, you won't see PA plugin if you choose dark color. My suggestion: play with your desktop theme (not icon theme). PA plugin looks very good with Numix theme on my system.

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Ah, darn. I hadn't noticed that. My bad.

Also had problems with this with Xfce-flat theme, however, it works fine with Numix theme and numix circle icons.