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MrMela
Asked: 2019-05-09 21:27:48 +0800 CST

Desktop Icons disappeared on Ubuntu 18.04

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I have already searched among many posts but I have not been able to solve, my problem is that since I updated to Ubuntu 18.04 I no longer see the icons on the desktop.

Through GNOME Tweaks if I try to enable the "Show icons" option a strange thing happens: the icons do not appear, but instead the Home folder opens By the way, the Home folder opens automatically whenever I start the PC, I think there could be a correlation but I don't know how.

Following another thread I downloaded the "Desktop icons" extension (that was missing) and with that I can finally see the icons, I can open the files but I can't move them or delete them, so I guess it's not the correct solution. In addition, even with Desktop icons, the Desktop settings in Tweak Tools have no effect.

Can anyone help me?

icons gnome-shell desktop-icons 18.04

4 Answers

  1. I had the same problem, all files on the desktop were gone.

    I then ran nautilus-desktop from the terminal and the files were shown again.

    So what happened? I had run

    usermod -G new-group my-username

    and forgot to include -a in the command, thus removing myself from all other groups. I had logged out and in again, then observed this.

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  2. On a Ubuntu 18.04 system, I followed these steps:

    1. I opened the "Desktop" folder in nautilus.
    2. I then dragged all the ".desktop" files to my desktop.
    3. When a dialog popped up and asked whether to trust those files, I answered in the affirmative.
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  3. Best Answer

    On Ubuntu 18.04 desktop icons are provided by nautilus-desktop which is a part of the nautilus package, not by the "Desktop Icons" extension as you have suspected. So it seems nautilus-desktop is not working correctly. To fix the issue purge and reinstall the nautilus package and restart your computer.

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  4. I'm far from a Linux expert but got asked to help when a friend hit this problem. I researched and tried a few solutions but nothing seemed to work. Eventually I looked at alternative desktop environment and this did the trick very nicely. My friend was already using Xubuntu (getting all that he can out of an old system) so I reloaded the xubuntu-desktop and voila! The best part was that it was a simple two step solution. (step 3 was reboot)

    Here's a link to the article I used: https://linuxconfig.org/8-best-ubuntu-desktop-environments-18-04-bionic-beaver-linux

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