I would be totally grateful for a drop-in replacement in 20.04 if it worked better. I am one of those types who uses my desktop heavily during projects then cleans it up when done, and moving from Unity has been painful (in this regard at least). I am an LTS-only type, so here is hoping… 
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I think it’s easily installable though, but you may need to manually disable the stock one which isn’t something too easy in the ubuntu session (you need to manually edit the ubuntu.json file in /usr/share/gnome-shell/modes)
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I have just disabled the old ‘Desktop icons’ from Extensions
The old one has been removed!
Calculating upgrade… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons vino
Use ‘sudo apt autoremove’ to remove them.
Sincere question- interested in experimenting (while still hopeful for a .deb in the future) it looks like there are versions for 3.34 and 3.38. Would one of these or the other work properly for 3.36 in 20.04?
Testing out Hirsute, it has Desktop Icons NG installed and it is very much usable. In my test I was able to create a folder on the desktop, made a test text file and saved that in the Home directory. Opened up Nautilus, and dragged that text file from Home on to the Desktop. From there I was able to drag the file into the test directory that I had created on the Desktop. I was also able to drag the text file out of that directory back on to the Desktop.
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That’s quite odd. I do sometimes use the Ubuntu Wayland (Focal) session instead of my usual GNOME one and all the Ubuntu extensions (desktop icons, app indicators & dock) are disabled just by toggling them OFF in extensions manager.
I don’t remember to have done any hack to achieve that. And for sure I did not edit an ubuntu.json file.
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It looks unlikely that desktop icons NG will be backported to 20.04 due to issues like this one.
It is unfortunate that 20.04 users will likely forever have the old extension by default, but at least next LTS will probably get the new extension
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Next LTS might be based on GNOME 40, not sure if there is a good desktop icons extension for it.