Can the "Starred" folder in the left pane of Files (nautilus) be removed?

On Ubuntu 19.10, I disable tracker because I do not like how my computer is overheating for several minutes after startup, and because I prefer full text search not be enabled in the file manager by default. The "Star" feature relies on Tracker and therefore does not work when tracker is disabled.

No option to disable the "Starred" folder is exposed in the Nautilus preferences, nor is a dconf setting available. The file user-dirs-dir determines the "special user folders" displayed in the left pane, but not the "Recent" or "Starred" items.

The question is: can the "Starred" item in the left pane (bookmark pane) of Files (nautilus) be removed?

There are a couple of not that trivial ways to remove the "Starred" item in the left bar of nautilus. The second option involves editing source code and recompiling. I will only cover the first way here.

1 - Create a folder to store the override

mkdir ~/.config/nautilus/ui

2 - Extract the resource description of the main window:

gresource extract /bin/nautilus \
/org/gnome/nautilus/ui/nautilus-window.ui \
> ~/.config/nautilus/ui/nautilus-window.ui

3 - Edit the properties of the GtkPlacesSidebar object: open the file you created in the previous step:

gedit ~/.config/nautilus/ui/nautilus-window.ui

and change the property show-starred-location to false as in following code snippet:

<object class="GtkPlacesSidebar" id="places_sidebar">
...
<property name="show-recent">False</property>
<property name="show-starred-location">False</property>
...
</object>

4 - Set the environment variable to make GLib use this override:

export G_RESOURCE_OVERLAYS="/org/gnome/nautilus/ui=$HOME/.config/nautilus/ui"

5 - You also need to set this via ~/.pam_environment, because Nautilus is started via D-Bus:

gedit ~/.pam_environment

and add following line

G_RESOURCE_OVERLAYS DEFAULT="/org/gnome/nautilus/ui=/home/confetti/.config/nautilus/ui"

where you change "confetti" by your own login name.

(with thanks to JusticeforMonica and DK Bose for the hints)

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