Dissappearing icon?

Support & Help Requests
#1

I’m one of those people who like a “clean screen”, as little as possible on my desktop. Mate is pretty good about this...I just drag what I want up to the panel and my desktop is clean. I drag Firefox,Terminal, Screenshot, Thunderbird, and Dolphin(Joe’s Home) . They all stay up in the panel after a bootup, except for the last two.

  1. I can move the Tbird icon up to the panel, but if I delete the Desktop icon, the icon in the panel goes away after a bootup. The only way to keep it showing at top is to keep the Tbird icon on the desktop...defeats the purpose!

  2. The Dolphin icon (Joe’s home)...I can move it to the panel, but cannot delete the desktop icon at all (have not tried CLI).

Anybody have any ideas? Thanks in advance for your reply.

#2

You could try right-clicking on the panel and selecting Add to Panel. Choose Application Launcher and then select Thunderbird. Do the same with Dolphin. I've don't use either application so I haven't tried it, but it should work.

#3

goinglinux, Thank you
It worked for Tbird! If I had known this trick, it would have saved me a lot of time... Didn't know about this utility...thanks!

Now I only had one icon to work on...I can make it only 33% of its size, barely noticeable on my background. The desktop is "clean"...done!

If you don't mind me asking, what do YOU use for Email and file manager?

Thanks again!

#4

I use Gmail in the browser for email. I find that email clients are more pain than they are worth, but that's just me.

The file manager I use is the one that come natively with Ubuntu MATE, since that's the distribution I use. It's called Caja. Dolphin is usually associated with the KDE desktop. (Or at least it was the last time I used it.) I have used Kubuntu, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE in the past and have swapped out various components like email clients, file managers, text editors and other apps, but I've settled on using whatever the distribution gives me since that is the best supported. It has eliminated a lot of the troubleshooting I used to do just to get my "experimental app" working when something broke.

One last tip for a clean desktop. If you open the MATE Tweak application, you'll find settings under the Desktop section that let's you deselect "Show Desktop icons". That will remove all icons from your desktop. If you leave it selected, you'll find additional options there so that you have a little more fine-tuned control over which icons are displayed or not.

1 Like
#5

goinglinux: thanks for sharing that info.

I'm not sure why I thought I was using Dolphin, maybe because I had just been playing with Kubuntu for a few days...I too am using Caja.

One last tip for a clean desktop: I sure wish I had known about this...this takes care of all the problem icons all at once. Brilliant!

I can't thank you enough for that tip! You have answered all my questions and I appreciate it.