Desktop Icons For The GNOME Shell Are Back With Beta Extension

[RahulSundaram]

Idiosyncrasy of the open source... from a side people that work or collaborate for (WHATEVER) remove a function and from an other side people that work and collaborate for the same (WHATEVER) reinstate this function...

Not quite. When the feature was dropped, the suggestion was to move the feature into an extension since the previous implementation wasn't maintained. Now someone in Red Hat is implementing that suggestion. It isn't part of the default workflow but you can use it if you like it. Classic users probably will.

[nej_simon]

Idiosyncrasy of the open source... from a side people that work or collaborate for (WHATEVER) remove a function and from an other side people that work and collaborate for the same (WHATEVER) reinstate this function...

It was removed to make it possible to modernize the Nautilus codebase and reinstated as an extension which, according to the gnome devs, are the proper way to do it. So there's nothing strange about it.

[WolfpackN64]

But at least you keep it organized (like I do). Some people have desktops full icons, which in real-life would mean that your desk is full of stuff you don't even remember and you can hardly reach for your mouse.

So to solve this problem: wouldn't it be better if there was a compromise? Like, you can keep desktop icons but there's a limit as to how many? That'll help keep things organized, but doesn't totally ditch the icons either.

Just like a real desk, it should be up to the user to tidy up every once in a while. You can make assumption on what is good for the user, but not too many. If you know you can't keep a clean desktop, just turn the icons off.

[nej_simon]

I like having temporary stuff on the desktop. It's typically faster to drop something on the desktop and drag it into another window than to browse to a save location and then browse to open the file. I understand the technical reason why it was removed but I think they'd should have waited until the replacement was ready to not break people's workflows.

[Mateus Felipe]

I used to have icons on my desktop until 2012, when I changed from Windows to Linux. Since then, I've ever used GNOME (other DEs are not polished enough) without icons on desktop and never missed it. After all, it doesn't make any sense.

[deant]

I cant understand why is GNOME the standart desktop? It is only getting worst. The ergonomy is beyond 0. MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE are doing much better work at giving the user nice control over the pc.

[WolfpackN64]

I used to have icons on my desktop until 2012, when I changed from Windows to Linux. Since then, I've ever used GNOME (other DEs are not polished enough) without icons on desktop and never missed it. After all, it doesn't make any sense.

It does make sense if you have the correct workflow (ie using it as a current projects place and not somewhere to dump all your files).

[dremon_nl]

I am not sure what is the target group of GNOME users.

The absolute majority of Linux users are advanced enough to be annoyed when some feature is removed because 'yeah let's make it dumb'.

And inexperienced users coming to Linux can't use a default GNOME configuration at all. They are frustrated and freaked away by lack of basic features and a messed way of configuring, like installing some 'extensions', which are often unmaintained, buggy and even require some manual command line installation of 'chrome-shell' or whatever stuff. Or a 'tweak tool' to enable really common features like minimize/maximize button. I've seen people trying to work with it and just giving up.

Desktop icons are not needed, wtf? All major operating systems and DE's have them, they are useful but GNOME lives in it's own universe, enforcing you to some 'correct workflows'.

[Danielsan]

So I found this article: https://csorianognome.wordpress.com/...desktop-plans/

And the one who got rid off the desktop backdrop support on Nautilus he is the one who reinstate it as Gnome Shell extension...

So I can take as good that for the sake of making a better recoding of Nautilus he deprecated the desktop backdrop function, but many years ago people used to critique Xfce because Thunar was and is still unable to handle the desktop surface, in fact it uses XFDesktop. This critique opened an internal debate in Xfce4 to consider the option to remove this component and integrate the function in thunar, I believed this idea was somehow suspended. As matter of fact now the paradigm has changed, it is better having an external component to handle the desktop.

I don't have enough knowledge to say if all these javascript extensions running on your DE are better or not respect to a true component written in C, C++ or even Rust... Fortunately I don't need to care about Gnome...

[dkasak]

Desktop icons. That's so late-90s.