4

I have installed Ubuntu Budgie version 20.04 and installed the Gnome desktop later. The current Gnome version is 3.36.3.

Usually, I have the desktop icons hidden, since I prefer a clean desktop with just the background and the panel.

Now I need the icons visible and cannot find an option in my system to do so. The site here explains how to achieve this by checking the option in the Extensions application like in the picture below on the left hand side.

Problem is, in my Extension app the option "Desktop Icons" is missing (picture below on the right). It's also not in the Tweak Tool.

enter image description here

Other sites like this one teach how to edit the gsettings, but in mine everything seems to be fine.

This is the printout of : gsettings list-recursively | grep icons

org.nemo.icon-view labels-beside-icons false
org.cinnamon.desktop.interface menus-have-icons true
org.cinnamon.desktop.interface buttons-have-icons false
org.cinnamon.desktop.interface toolbar-icons-size 'large'
com.github.maoschanz.drawing big-icons false
org.gnome.gedit.plugins.filebrowser virtual-root 'file:///home/rainer/.icons/Zafiro-Icons-Blue'
org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true
org.gnome.desktop.interface menus-have-icons false
org.gnome.desktop.interface buttons-have-icons false
org.gnome.desktop.interface toolbar-icons-size 'large'
org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons true
org.nemo.desktop show-orphaned-desktop-icons true
com.solus-project.budgie-panel desktop-icons-handler 'NEMO'

Anyone has an idea what's happening and how I can obtain the desktop icons?

rainer
  • 275
  • 3
  • 13

2 Answers2

4

To get your desktop icons back, install gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons.

BeastOfCaerbannog
  • 14,585
heynnema
  • 70,711
  • Here is the problem, it seems applications can't drag and drop icons to the desktop with this extension... This one seems better: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2087/desktop-icons-ng-ding/ – TCB13 Nov 07 '21 at 20:59
3

Ubuntu 20.04 doesn’t have desktop icons by default. So you need to install a GNOME Shell extension yourself.

You can install it for every users of the computer by installing the gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons package (this is heynnema’s answer).

But you can also install it only for you, the current user. For this, you just need to go to the GNOME extensions website and install whatever extension you want. I would suggest for example DING. You also have Desktop Icons. It’s easy to remove extensions after installing them, so just test them. However, make sure you don't have two of these extensions enabled at the same time, for example using gnome-tweaks, or you will probably experiment conflicts.

An alternative for the "Extensions" utility from Activities to get information about installed extensions is the gnome-extensions command. It gives you some extra tools and also the full path where an extension has been installed. Use man gnome-extensions for more information.

See also: How do I install and manage GNOME Shell extensions?

Zatigem
  • 478
  • this one brought my icons back after losing them uninstalling nautilus, and being unable to easily install dautilus with dependency problems. 20.04.1 - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2452/desktop-icons/ – pierrely Feb 06 '21 at 05:05