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I don't much like the look of desktop icons, so I decided I wanted to disable them. I googled the issue, and everything that came up told me to hit alt+f2, type gconf-editor and hit enter to open the config. From there I could find the option to disable them. Well, Ubuntu told me this wasn't a valid command. Someone else suggested to try entering it into the terminal, I did and it didn't work but informed me I could enter 

sudo apt install gconf-editor

to get it working.

I did, and after this when I tried to enter gconf-editor in the alt+f2 menu, it did work. However, the configuration editor for me is very bare bones and does not contain much, including the option to disable dekstop icons spelled out in the other post:

This is what it looks like.

pomsky
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1 Answers1

14

GConf is obsolete and it has been replaced by dconf/gsettings. To disable desktop icons run the following command in Terminal.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false

For a GUI alternative use dconf-editor instead of gconf-editor, navigate to /org/gnome/desktop/background/, and disable show-desktop-icons option.

Alternatively, use GNOME Tweaks (gnome-tweaks) to turn off the "Show Icons" option in the Desktop tab.

enter image description here

pomsky
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    The terminal command and dconf-editor solutions are failing quietly for me in Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS. – aquirdturtle Feb 05 '22 at 20:50
  • This question and answer are specifically for Ubuntu 18.04 and not at all applicable to 20.04 as desktop icons [are handled completely differently](https://askubuntu.com/q/1231413/480481) in newer Ubuntu releases. – pomsky Feb 06 '22 at 08:35