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On 25/10/2018 15:36, Richard Brown wrote: > ...we can install a > different file manager and get the result we want. It seems to me that > Nautilus is the problem not Gnome. Well it's a bit more complicated than that predictably - nautilus is a critical part of the Gnome suite and is actually responsible for displaying the desktop icons in the first place. So Gnome have deprecated desktop icon support in their DE as a whole (as of 3.28) precisely _by_ removing the functionality from nautilus to be accurate. Ubuntu have always shipped butchered and heavily patched versions of Gnome originally because they were basing their now-abandoned Unity DE on it. So it was common for odd mismatched versions of the Gnome DE software stack to appear on Ubuntu and still is even now for some reason, particularly on LTS releases. This 18.04 box for example has: ghost@failbot:~/SRC/linux$ apt-cache policy gnome-shell | head -n 3 gnome-shell: Installed: 3.28.3-0ubuntu0.18.04.2 Candidate: 3.28.3-0ubuntu0.18.04.2 ghost@failbot:~/SRC/linux$ apt-cache policy nautilus | head -n 3 nautilus: Installed: 1:3.26.4-0~ubuntu18.04.2 Candidate: 1:3.26.4-0~ubuntu18.04.2 Notice nautilus is still at 3.26, precisely because it was the last release that supported desktop icons: presumably Canonical didn't want to upset users by pushing such a controversial change at the last minute, especially for a LTS release? As per usual for a LTS, it's not expected that Canonical will ever backport a newer Gnome release over 18.04 so LTS users are probably going to be stuck with it for the next 4 years... I'm not sure what's going on in the 18.10 release as I haven't had a chance to poke it much yet but in a brief poke with a VM I did notice that Cosmic does indeed still have desktop icons via gnome-tweak. Presumably Canonical have again shipped a patched version of nautilus and some other Gnome bits. Of note, Gnome haven't actually abandoned desktop icons per se - there's a perfectly reasonable explanation as per usual (the old nautilus desktop codebase was horrid basically). Bit of background: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/08/gnomes-new-desktop-icons-extension-enter-beta In true form there's also a gnome-shell extension to put them back: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1465/desktop-icons/ I don't think it works very well yet. Personally I'm not bothered - my Arch systems all lost their Gnome desktop icons months ago when they upgraded and I don't remember even noticing! Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq