Actually, the discussion was moved to GitLab, the last comment was a month ago. @didrocks seems to be waiting on more discussion from Muellner on this issue before progressing?
Thanks for that. I merged it, and I’ve uploaded a new version (also 3.30.4) to the PPA. I looked at the interface in d-feet and the property contained a value. Didn’t test it more than that…
From my POV this is a dead technology and we should be looking to remove it rather than fix it up. What about porting the Unity lens to use something else? Like tracker 
- probably would be a medium amount of work though.
No, I don’t really know what you’re referring to TBH. Corporates? Was there a mechanism for doing this before? (Could be, I just don’t know what it is.)
Sweet, that looks nice 
Guess we should try to get a new release in disco at the same time.
2 Likes
Can’t those users just disable the extension? 
Presumably this is a baked-in extension like the Ubuntu Dock and Kstatusnotifieritem/appindicator support, so the toggles will make no difference and one would have to remove the Deb instead (which removes the ubuntu-desktop meta-package in the process).
You are right!
Well, I think there is no downside in having them if you do not use them.
Whereas not having them when you want to use them (desktop+ desktop folders) is bad.
Thus I say this is a tolerable “missing feature” =)
Actually, and ironically, there has been a comment yesterday morning from Florian. Pausing a little bit the installer work, I plan to resume finishing addressing the concerns (the POC works from the beginning, but the patch is too large to carry it at the distro level) next week, and we’ll see.
I still think that people who want to have a more vanilla GNOME environment (no desktop icons, their own or no dock, no status notifier icon) should really install the GNOME vanilla session. They are then loosing some of nice ubuntu-specific enhancements but if they don’t want to take the whole experience, this is what makes more sense than hacking and replacing pieces in an untested frankenstein environment.
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Respectfully, disabling desktop icons is not enough to make a Frankenstein environment. I think it is a somewhat popular way of using the desktop and has been “supported” via the GNOME Tweaks app since 2011.
Here’s an achievable suggestion: I think it would be nice if Ubuntu 19.04 offered a more direct way of hiding the Home and Trash launchers from the desktop (and showing them again).
That way, a user can easily control whether there is an empty desktop appearance or not.
By the way, if you disable both the Home and Trash launchers and have no other desktop icons, it appears that the extension basically disables itself until something is added to the desktop. (I didn’t read through the code.)
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Sounds like a little bit like bishedding, but my point remains: it’s an unsupported configuration compared to the default experience we provide. We, for instance, add icons on the desktop in the install session and that’s only one example.
So it diverges from the default.
However, as said, we provide a way to get new defaults in a vanilla environment and that’s good for people who wants to personalize more, without having ubuntu-specific features relying on having extensions X, Y or Z.
I guess Tweaks can provide what you propose if it doesn’t already, but you will be the one knowing more on that front.
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Couldn’t this be built into gnome settings?
Ofc I install gnome tweaks on most of my installations but thinking of the average Joe I would rather put features into the default applications, if “removing desktop icons” is a feature.
Without a compelling case, It’s not a feature we’re currently looking to provide.
You have had to use GNOME Tweaks (or a lower level tool like gsettings or dconf-editor) to disable desktop icons in Ubuntu’s default desktop for years already. So it’s not unreasonable to keep those options in the Tweaks app.
In Tweaks > Extensions > Desktop icons > gear button, you can disable the Home & Trash icons. If you had any (other) desktop icons, you can delete or move those yourself.
I think there’s an argument for making disabling the Home & Trash icons easier (like it was in previous GNOME releases) so someone can open a Tweaks bug for that.
To give my example, I tend to disable all icons on the desktop (Home, Network Servers, and Mounted Volumes), but keep the Trash icon. So if this is going to be an option in Tweak or in GNOME settings, it would be great. So us users can pick and choose what we want.
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I have a simple question. What is the point of having a blank desktop ? Why should a user need to see a mostly blank screen ? This mostly blank screen will be presented to them hundreds of time while their use of Ubuntu.
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It’s uncluttered and upstream, some people like it that way by default for some reason and some people like to go with what upstream do. We have gnome-session, I suppose! But I think people don’t like that too much because there’s no way to graphically install it and GNOME purists would rather that were the default Ubuntu session anyway and people should, in their opinion, optionally customize from there with fully-featured GNOME Extensions (not stripped-down supported-by-default Debs). It’s basically the big battle between Ubuntu and Fedora - ‘sane defaults’ vs ‘upstream first’.
I think some people thought that using gnome-session was too buggy but I don’t know what the specific bugs were (maybe theming etc?), I always encourage people who complain about that to file their bugs so hopefully we’ll see more on that front
No one is forced to add anything to the Desktop.
The only things that show are the trash & home icons, trash can be removed. If the home icon is removed then it appears desktop support is effectively disabled.
The trash icon should be in the launcher, why the home icon is shown (for desktop support) is unclear
+1
This is not the place to discuss the upstream decision, but yes it feels like they (again) took a pretty dramatic choice without any user/usability testing. Only having a pretty wallpaper, seems like a waste of space. I cannot think of another OS (or DE) where you can’t put anything on the desktop. Sorry for the offtopic rant 
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Considering the largest amount of “desktop users” in the world use desktop icons, we are just “satisfying” small amount of desktop users with this no-desktop-icons attitude. No one had ever worked with a desktop completely free, at least a pen and a paper would be there. Why do you need a desktop, if you don’t use it? One might as well sit on the ground, but even on that you have to put something.
The whole idea is to have that icon on the desktop, so you can click on it and bang your app/file/folder would open.
Beautiful, but useless. (Panel autohidden)
And, this
is useful. The same desktop wallpaper, but with a desktop that can be used for daily work. You put things on the desktop, use them, and put them away. That’s what a desktop is for. At work, in the kitchen, in the basement…you need some place to put things on…to work with…
The same desktop background paper, a DE based on Gnome, and useful.
Take the desktop away from users, you chase the users away, period!
(This is 19.04, not 18.10)
On the other side, the desktop icons where most useful when the OS didn’t have a powerful search that gives the user everything he/she wants without the need of shortcuts on the desktop
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It is again a question of “What is the target audience?”
It is the same question I would ask myself if I want to remove the dock from the desktop.
If it specialists, devs or power users are the target audience (I think POP OS targets that audience) than no desktop icons and no dock are a good idea, since those people may not use them because their hands are glued to the keyboard anyways and hitting the super/windows key to open the dash and search for “chr…” -> Chrome then hit enter might be what they do.
But when you target the “average Joe”/ Linux newcomer / any age (kid-grandpa) then no desktop + no dock might be a tiny bit too obscure and irritating. When you design software you need to know what your target audience is.
Long story short, it was a very good idea to provide dash-to-dock and a desktop for Ubuntu 17.10+, in my opinion.
I think the people who want to use Ubuntu but want to remove/deactivate the gnome desktop icons extension could be a rather small group and that group is very aware of how they can remove a .deb package.
So this would not hold me from preventing the extension to be put into 19.4 and thus providing an up to date nautilus + desktop.