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    The other thing to remember, that's specific to file/program icons: In Windows you can zoom in and out in explorer to make the icons really gigantic or really tiny. You would not want a tiny 16x16 image scaled up to 512x512, it would be very pixelated, and you also would not want a 512x512 image downsized to 16x16, as the post demonstrates (the high resolution image is less distinguishable). Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 1:38
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    @RoelSchroeven: GUI scaling, at least for the latter. With high DPI settings, Windows can scale its UI by 150%. This means Windows will check for a 24x24 icon icon instead of a 16x16. Why not add an 48x48? Presumably LibreOffice thought that the 32x32 icon scaled well enough. 22x22 is weird, I'd expect a 20x20 for 125%. Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 8:03
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    Great answer. Feels like the 3rd point should come first though, it's the most important, IMO. Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 9:55
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    @RoelSchroeven it's typical to have these sizes in freedesktop.org-based environments. You can see other common sizes in e.g. Ubuntu using a command like basename -a /usr/share/icons/*/[0-9]*/ | sort -uh Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 11:04
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    The latter part of the answer is good, but the implied order of relevance of the reasons given in this answer is off: image processing time is essentially completely irrelevant: if it is considered at all (and, I claim, it usually isn’t), it’s much less important than the issue of accurate scaling. Similarly, I don’t think memory requirements are often considered for icons. Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 16:24