Questions[desktop-icons](ubuntu)

My Desktop icons keep toggling between these two types of arrangement (image attached):

I can't really tell what triggers the toggle. It seems like the first type occurs after logging in, and then it switches to the second type when specific actions are done. I tested it by creating a new directory in the Desktop. This sometimes triggers the change, but sometimes not. Sometimes moving the newly created directory to trash seems to trigger it.

Turning on/off the Desktop icons extension does not seem to do anything.

How do I fix this?

Just to note, I am using Nemo as my default file manager.

UPDATE: This was helpful. By removing the Desktop icons extension (apparently by deleting the actual directory of the extension) and making Nemo handle the desktop icons seems to be working fine.

I've just upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to its newest LTS version - 20.04. While it comes with some interesting changes, the Desktop icon system was messed up in my opinion. When you hover the mouse cursor over the icons, you see a huge space marked around them that cannot be violated (as you can see in the image below) so that they need to be placed very far apart from each other.

18.04 allowed you to place icons much closer to each other and didn't have that marked space around them. This new way leaves much less space on the Desktop to organize large amounts of icons - including folders, files and shortcuts. Is there a way I can significantly reduce the size of icons and their "spaces" or go back to the old system of organizing files? On "Settings", there is a tool to change the size of Dock icons, but not of Desktop icons.

Also, every time I move or delete something, the Desktop "flashes" and the icons seem to rearrange themselves automatically, nothing of which happened in 18.04. I also can't move anything directly to the Desktop; I need to move to the Desktop folder on Nautilus. This makes me start to think about downgrading Ubuntu back to 18.04.

In Ubuntu 20.04, on the desktop, there is a number of actions I wish I could do, such as, by order of importance :

• use keyboard shortcuts such as select all, copy / paste.
• use drag & drop with icons
• deactivate the "mouse over" highlight, and restrict the clicking area to only the icon, not the surrounding square

To put it simply, I'd like to have the exact same features as offered by the desktop of Ubuntu 18.04 (probably related to a specific version of GNOME, and not Ubuntu itself).

Am I missing something obvious here? I actually see no reason why those actions are removed or deactivated on the desktop, since they all work in any Nautilus window.

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?

In 11.10 Using Configuration editor, one used to be able to edit a boolean parameter named : Desktop_Show This allowed to hide/show all desktop icons. This latter was removed in 12.04.

Someone, knows how to hide desktop icons automatically?

Thanks