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J Greene
Asked: 2019-04-23 13:57:54 +0800 CST

Drag-and-drop functionality no longer working after upgrade to 19.04

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After upgrading from 18.04 to 19.04 (with a necessary upgrade to 18.10 between) on a Lenovo Yoga 11e, I can no longer drag and drop anything (ie, files, windows, etc.) with the touchpad. I can, however, move things around using the touchscreen. Whenever I attempt to do so with the mouse, though, sometimes it turns into a hand. Whether or not it turns into the hand or remains a pointer, the icon will not move anymore. IOW, as soon as I left-click, the pointer freezes in place until I release the touchpad.

mouse touchscreen touchpad 19.04

7 Answers

  1. Yup: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/desktop-icons/issues/22

    Just the most recent installment of the long, proud tradition of new GNOME releases breaking significant functionality used by many people. "Move fast and break things," and all that. sigh

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  2. I've found a fix for this; you have to disable the experimental views. It can be done in the terminal by running: 

    gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences use-experimental-views false
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  3. I am using Ubuntu 19.10 and have found another extension Desktop Icons NG (DING) by rastersoft which allows the contents of .~/desktop to be seen on the desktop. It also allows new folders to be made on the desktop via a right-click on the mouse and to drag and drop from Nautilus folders onto the desktop. It does not allow dragging from the desktop and dropping into a Nautilus folder.

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  4. The problem in 19.04 is that you can no longer use the traditional Desktop to store frequently accessed single items or single files.

    You can enable a home folder icon, and a trash icon, by the use of the Desktop Icons GNOME extension found here. It's feature limited right now, but it's expected that its feature set will be expanded in the future.

    You can however, use folders on the Desktop. Use Files (Navigator) to create a folder on your current Desktop called... say... Work in Progress. Then drag all individual items/files from the current Desktop into this new open folder.

    Now you can drag and drop files/items {in to | out of} this open folder as you could before. D&D files/items on to other app icons should also work via folder to folder D&D. Of course, you can also right-click on a file and use the Open with contextual menu item.

    Think of the Work in Progress folder as the "new" Desktop in 19.04. Anything that you could do in the 18.xx Desktop, you should be able to do in the open Work in Progress folder in 19.04.

    Update #1:

    A note from user FedonKadifeli...

    *A note: The problem described here occurs when I login to a GNOME desktop session (the default in my installation). I tested and found that it does not occur when I login to an Ubuntu desktop session. So, this may be the difference between your case and my case.

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  5. I am not sure if my problem orginated from exact scenarios but I was not able to drag and select anything in my system - neither in my browser, or in editor or in file navigator. The drag rectangle was not appearing or text was not getting selected.

    It was working earlier so I had to figure out what happened that led to this. I had recently installed gnome-tweaks and had changed mouse settings to enable the right click emulation on the touchpad according to this.

    https://itsfoss.com/fix-right-click-touchpad-ubuntu/

    I went and disabled that option and switched to mouseclick emulation with fingers. That seems to have solved my issue.

    I found a couple of related issues. Thought I should tag all of them here

    Drag & drop does not work on Ubuntu desktop https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/423543/drag-and-drop-not-working-in-gnome3-file-manager-selects-multiple-files-instead https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/bhgte9/help_freshly_installed_1904_and_cant_drag_and/

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  6. To fix the issue, I've select "Ubuntu with Wayland" in the connection screen under the gear icon.

    As Wayland seems to be the future (and the new default?) that may explain why they still did not fix the issue.

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  7. In 20.04 should downgrade to Nautilus 3.26 and Nautilus data, then activate desktop icon extensions, it works again without losing all newest features. The problem seems to be with latest Nautilus not latest gnome.

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