9

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
  • 70,557
MrMela
  • 93

4 Answers4

5

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
  • 72,312
Kim Lundberg Stegenborg Madsen
  • 151
3

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
  • 371
2

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
  • 70,557
0

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
  • 1