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I upgraded to Artful several days ago. I was in the process of adding some shell extensions and doing a few tweaks, logging out and back in to see what 'took'. After one set of small changes, when I logged back in again all of the icons were stacked atop one another in the upper left corner. I right-clicked and arranged the icons and they distributed themselves on the desktop.

Problem now is, I can't get the desktop manager to remember where I place the icons on the desktop. Every time I log out and back in, the desktop manager rearranges the icons.

I've now spent a whole day trying to fix the issue. I've tried both gnome and nemo managing the desktop. I've tried every conceivable setting in settings, Tweaks, dconf-editor, gconf-editor, and alternatives config. I've even tried both mutter and metacity window managers. No joy anywhere.

At this point, any and all insights and suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

--Warren

Warren Severin
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  • Assuming you undid "one set of small changes" you could try resetting gnome defaults, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/56313/how-do-i-reset-gnome-to-the-defaults/959976#959976 (my post. – doug Nov 01 '17 at 00:53
  • Doug, thanks for the quick reply. I'd have replied to your reply sooner except I got myself into even more trouble. The suggestion: dconf reset -f /org/gnome/ did not work. Nuked my computer back to the dark ages and the problem remains. I then tried using dconf to set gnome session autosave. Don't ever do that. It locked me out of my login account for a couple of hours till I figured a work around. That's another story.

    So, problem persists and I'm hoping someone will chime in with a solution while I clean up from my nuclear cataclysm.

     – Warren Severin Nov 01 '17 at 04:44

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I've come across the same problem and I fixed it.

  1. Check if there is any metadata files that have only the root read/write access in the ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/ directory

  2. Open your file manager as root and change the access or remove those files (I removed them)...

  3. Restart your user session and it should be fixed. Did the trick for me.

I knew those files were wrong because no file should have only the root access inside your home directory unless you've set it up explicitly.

Patrick Cyiza
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