How to organize desktop icons in Disco Dingo

Solution 1:

At this point it's not possible.

Ubuntu 19.04 comes with gnome shell extension: "desktop icons". In previous versions of Ubuntu desktop icons was provided by nautilus, but new version of nautilus (3.32) lost desktop icons functionality.

Unfortunately looks like extension's author decided not to implement any sorting/rearranging features: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/desktop-icons/issues/98

Solution 2:

Can hack around:

1. Create a copy of all files on desktop to another directory
2. Delete all files on desktop (that have been safely the copied)
3. Move the copies back to desktop

Note: if you just move all files to a different directory then back it "remembers" their previous location which is pretty annoying. Yet new instances of files are inserted in a way that's intuitive (to me at least).

Obviously this method is suboptimal because I've noticed that in 19.04 any file operations through nautilus are now painfully slow, particularly involving the desktop (note that my hardware is less than a year old and using SSDs, so it's not that). Have large monitors though, my instinct is that it could be those.

And while I'm complaining I do not think it's cool that my desktop changes when I show/hide hidden system files (files beginning is ".", toggled using Ctrl-h). Is that behaviour that anyone wants? On their desktop?