Cannot move files from and to Desktop
Yes, Drag and Drop is an issue most people find in Ubuntu. The reason behind the drag and drop not working is the experimental view of the Nautilus File Manager.
To fix this, all you have to do is to disable the experimental view again.
Open the Nautilus file manager and click on the top left Files and go to Preferences. Clear the “Use the new views” option under Experimental.
You can also refer to already published questions here.
Right click on the file/Dir-> show in Files. This will open the files window and now you'll be able to drag and drop.
The reason behind the drag and drop not working was the experimental view of GNOME Files (previously known as Nautilus).
To fix this, all you have to do is to disable the experimental view again. Following is the command to do so
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences use-experimental-views false
I hope this quick tip helped you to fix the annoying drag and drop issue in Ubuntu. If you have questions or suggestions, do leave a comment below.
I am also just starting with Ubuntu 20, many new amazing things work out of the box but the Desktop behaviour feels indeed "experimental", and I wasn't able to deactivate it with the other suggestions in this post.
So far, I found a slightly ridiculous but effective workaround to move around multiple files, hopefully it helps getting insight into the other issues:
- Click and drag to select the desired files
- Pressing control or shift, click once on the file you will use as pivot (and then release). This will deselect that particular file
- Still pressing control or shift, click on the pivot file and drag. All files will move around.
This way, files can also be moved into folders that are present in the desktop, but not into other opened windows.
The problem was that, if you don't do step 2, all the files except the pivot would move around. This smells like a bug to me but could be indeed a (rather experimental if you ask me) feature.
Cheers, Andres
As said above, the desktop icons are provided by a Gnome shell extension - a crap one, and it's there by default!
Luckily, you can turn it off, and use one that actually works, please see links below in ubuntuhandbook and to the shell extension itself.
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2020/10/enable-drag-drop-desktop-ubuntu-20-04/
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2087/desktop-icons-ng-ding/