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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?

pomsky
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MrMela
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  • Desktop icons only for *.desktop files present in the ~/Desktop folder will be displayed. Please, check your ~/Desktop folder contents (with command line). – FedKad May 09 '19 at 07:19

4 Answers4

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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.

Zanna
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Kim Lundberg Stegenborg Madsen
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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.
dzmanto
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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.

pomsky
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  • Does not work on Ubuntu 19.10. – Lexible Mar 27 '20 at 03:02
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    It's not supposed to. The question is specifically about 18.04 and the answer mentions the difference in the methods of desktop icon handling between 18.04 (`nautilus-desktop`) and later releases (*Desktop Icons* extension). – pomsky Mar 27 '20 at 08:18
  • I made the comment for other 19.10 users, that's all. :) – Lexible Mar 27 '20 at 16:00
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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

Bret Carver
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