No icons for automounted volumes on GNOME / Nautilius desktop on Ubuntu 19.04

Up to Ubuntu 18.04, using default GNOME/Nautilius desktop, when I inserted a (data file) USB stick it would automount and put a USB icon onto the desktop. I find this very useful, especially for quick eject via context menu.

Now at 19.04, on USB insertion I do see a "banner" appear for a few seconds, but I no longer get any desktop icon . I run under VirtualBox on Windows, but that has not changed and I do not think is at issue. Ubuntu does still automount the stick at /media/<username>.

I found https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB. I checked in dconf-editor and both keys, including org.gnome.desktop.media-handling.automount-open, are set.

Solution 1:

The mechanism by which desktop icons has fundamentally changed since Ubuntu 19.04. Previously, desktop icons were provided by the file manager Nautilus. That functionality was stripped out of more recent versions of Nautilus. Because of this, Ubuntu shipped with an older version of Nautilus.

In Ubuntu 19.04, nautilus ships with an up to date version of Nautilus, which cannot provide desktop icons. To implement desktop icons, they now make use of a GNOME Shell extension "Desktop Icons". This extension can still be called "early" and does not support all features of the old system. Among others, icons for removable icons will not automatically be placed and removed from your desktop.

Until the "Desktop Icons" can bring back that feature, you will need to change your workflow.

• Removable icons are visible in the left pane of the file manager. They can easily be managed there.
• Alternatively, you could install a GNOME Shell extension "Removable drive menu". This adds a button on your top bar from which you can access removable drives. This button is always visible, in contrast to a desktop icon, which is more often hidden by an application window than not.

The GNOME Shell extension "Removable Drive Menu" is an officially supported extension because it is part of "GNOME Classic", a series of extensions that make GNOME Shell look and (more or less) behave as GNOME 2.

You can install it (along with some other of this group of extensions) by installing the package gnome-shell-extensions. You will need to install "GNOME Tweaks" to activate the extension.

Alternatively, you can install it from the GNOME Shell extensions website.