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Electw
Asked: 2020-01-30 10:48:52 +0800 CST

Unable to disable Desktop Icons extension

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The Desktop Icons GNOME extension in Ubuntu 19.10 is not working properly. Double clicking an icon produces a notification saying there is an error:

Execution of "PATH_TO_FILE"
Command not found

I have found another desktop icons extension that works much better. However, Ubuntu does not let me turn off or delete the default extension, and it interferes with the new extension. Using the Synaptic Package Manager says it will also remove ubuntu-desktop and ubuntu-desktop-minimal. Is there a way to remove the extension safely?

gnome-shell desktop-icons gnome-shell-extension 19.10

4 Answers

  1. To disable the default desktop icon extension, run the built-in Extensions application. Then find 'Desktop Icons' under the Built-In section, and disable it there.

    For some reason it's not possible to disable the extension using the Tweaks application, which also lists GNOME Shell extensions. But the Extensions application works fine for this purpose.

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  2. Best Answer

    The pre-installed system extension 'Desktop Icons' keeps its config files in the /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/desktop-icons@csoriano/ directory. If you're absolutely sure, you can disable the extension by removing this directory. It is highly recommended to just rename the directory so that if anything goes wrong you would be able to recover by reverting to the original name.

    Note that this directory would most certainly be re-created after an upgrade to an associated package. So you would have to repeat the renaming part after each such update.

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  3. To be clear: I don't (!) use Ubuntu 19.04 or later like Eletwo and had installed the Desktop Icon extension manually.

    When I wanted to find the config files of my manually installed "Desktop Icons" extension (in order to change them), I couldn't find them where pomsky suggested, but instead at: ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/desktop-icons@csoriano

    Just in case somebody else has troubles finding them and ends up here, like I did.

    This might seem obvious in the manually installed case: For deleting the extension, what worked for me is using the GNOME shell intregration Add-on in Firefox (where I had installed it) -> Installed extensions: https://extensions.gnome.org/local/

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  4. You can disable GNOME shell extension by running command gnome-extensions disable <extension-name> on terminal.

    To get the name of the extension, you can run ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions and ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions

    ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions
gnome-extensions disable [email protected]

    To enable an extension, run gnome-extensions enable <extension-name>

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