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?
14 Answers
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.
On a Ubuntu 18.04 system, I followed these steps:
- I opened the "Desktop" folder in nautilus.
- I then dragged all the ".desktop" files to my desktop.
- When a dialog popped up and asked whether to trust those files, I answered in the affirmative.
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.
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:
