Missing desktop icons

Frederick_Wrigley 2015-11-04 14:55:33 UTC #1

Fresh installation of Ubuntu MATE 15.10 and there are no desktop icons at all. I had them the last time I installed. (I was trying out Arch and had gotten a blank screen at bootup) Is there some simple way to display the contents of ~/Desktop?

v3xx 2015-11-04 16:25:22 UTC #2

This is odd behavior and suggest a bad install. Have you changed install media?

Also if you have not did your first update, you should. It tends to fix things.

This can be done either in terminal or console with the command..

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

johnuren1980 2015-11-04 19:42:14 UTC #3

Fresh installation of Ubuntu MATE 15.10 and there are no desktop icons at all. I had them the last time I installed.

This sounds like either:

1) You had the default Desktop icons on. You can check at:

System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> MATE Tweak

and look at the Desktop pane. You can check or uncheck various icons for the desktop
or
2) You had Caja drawing icons on the desktop. This is configurable in dconf Editor (Here be dragons. dconf Editor is powerful so be careful). Go to:

Applications -> System Tools -> dconf Editor

and go to

org -> mate -> desktop -> background

and see if

show-desktop-icons

is checked?
Try toggling the option to see if icons come back or not.

Frederick_Wrigley 2015-11-04 19:49:59 UTC #4

Thank you! Dconf-editor is what did the trick; I was baffled, but the only stupid question is one which is never asked!

I mean, if I didn't want desktop icons, I could have gone with Unity or GNOME 3 .

I've been using MATE since Mint came out with it, and, having started using Ubuntu with 8.04, was very dismayed that the interface I had fallen in love with was...discontinued. When Ubuntu MATE came out, I started my Happy Dance

With MATE, I have been able to use my computer the way I want it to run.

Now, I'm going to try to get people to pronounce MATE correctly !