In Budgie settings, you can either enable or disable desktop icons as for now. If Budgie users want that feature, upstream would maintain that, won’t they at Solus-project?
No - all that setting does is toggle the Nautilus setting to turn on/off desktop icons. Budgie Desktop like Unity Desktop depends on Nautilus capabilities to display desktop icons.
that is referring to v11 of budgie-desktop which is not available for 18.04 LTS - it is in a very early research and development phase. Here this discussion is referring to current versions of gnome-shell/unity and budgie.
If upstream is not going to move (yet) to Nautilus v3.28, we should also stay with v3.26. If upstream moves on to v3.28, then a patch would be there to enable/disable desktop icons, I believe.
Get rid of the desktop icons. It’s a place where all I get is a bunch of trash. It’s a chance: Maybe I’ll get neater without a desktop. Not without reason there are category folders.
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Agreed.
IMHO with the Gnome DE, having desktop icons is redundant. I used to use it prior to installing Ubuntu’s Dock, [which is fantastic BTW] on Ubuntu’s Vanilla Gnome.
If one is using a conventional old school desktop, then sure I could see that feature as being needed. But there are other file manglers 
that can do the job.
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I remember during the 1.0 WWW Bubble, that some ex-Apple engineers got an exorbitant sum from VCs, to develop an improved file manager for Linux. The result was Nautilus.
At the time, there weren’t many good ones, other than MC. If I remember correctly, they ran out of funds before they considered it a completed product. Sh*t maybe I should have researched this before posting, rather than relying on memory. Ah well, I’ll do that now.
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As a user I want Ubuntu to track upstream Gnome as much as possible. Nautilus is a very active project currently, gets refinements every release and I don’t want to miss out on those.
The architectural changes that will land for 3.28 will have significant UX improvements, such as the GUI not locking up when a file operation takes long or when you connect to a non-existent server. Speed of development will only improve according to the devs, so we’ll be missing out on a lot if we remain on 3.26.
I don’t mind losing desktop icons, but I don’t mind having them either.
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I think an extension would be the most efficient for everyone because a fork would make it more aware of the changes made in the original and adjust it in the fork eating time and energy, and use Nemo would be outdated with the graphical interface (Gnome Shell ) it would not look good
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When the Nautilus developers suggested using Nemo, they didn’t mean to use it instead of Nautilus as the default file manager. They only meant that you could run the nemo-desktop app automatically at login only for the desktop handling feature. For everything else, you can still use Nautilus.
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Would packaging two versions of nautilus be an option? Nautilus and nautilus-legacy? The latter staying on 3.26 for Unity and Budgie?
Or creating your own file manager for Budgie…
Would forking the “nautilus-desktop” part of nautilus (from an older commit) and maintain it as a community thing would be a solution ?
I’m trying to look a bit at Nautilus’s code structure to see if it’s possible, but the two code seems to be still a lot interlinked… At first, maybe just forking+renaming and compiling only the “nautilus-desktop” binaries could be a solution, but the “application-only” part would have later to go ?
(I don’t use the desktop icons myself, but I think that it could be a good solution for Unity, Budgie and GNOME Flashback).
Considering Budgie, how about using Dolphin?
Both unity and budgie are for GTK based desktops so dolphin with its large kde and qt based dependencies will not work unfortunately.
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Forking that bit of code was mentioned in jbicha link . However trying to find someone to actually do this bit of work and maintain it thereafter is going to be a challenge.
It is not possible to create a new file manager in the month and a half left before the lts freeze date.
Not worried about the LTS, considering Budgie. It would be nice to have Budgie File Manager, rather than Nautilus. The main idea behind Budgie (and Solus) is to create a desktop oriented DE/distro. So, Nautilus with its continuously losing features doesn’t match with Budgie. It would be nice to have a full-featured file manager as Dolphin with Budgie.
Looking at the patches Ubuntu has against upstream Nautilus, the list is still significant in 18.04. You could easily argue that Ubuntu already forks Nautilus and has done for a long time. That said, I am concerned that Ubuntu’s Nautilus doesn’t get as much attention as other components right now. It has 2039 bugs open – an order of magnitude more than other major components like gnome-shell.
Fun fact: Last I checked, nautilus-desktop was an X11 app only (it relies on Xwayland to run at all). So it seems it hasn’t been ported to pure Wayland yet. And even if upstream didn’t kill nautilus-desktop, someone would still need to fix/rewrite parts of it to remove the dependency on X11. Simply forking what exists now is not a solution that will work for very long. Someone would have to commit to fixing the code too.
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