Ubuntu 21.04 Nautilus sidebar Desktop icon is missing

It has been asked many times but none of the solutions helped me. I updated from 20.10 and now Nautilus sidebar Desktop icon is missing.

Here's my user-dirs.dirs:

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run.
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
# 
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

I know I can put a bookmark of desktop but I don't want that, I just want the desktop back in the prior position.

Solution 1:

Update: this is a GTK 3 bug that happens in Wayland sessions, which is now (Ubuntu 21.04) the default display server. When using a X11 session you can still see the folder.

Original answer: I'm experiencing the same problem. I tried a lot of things (check user-dirs.dirs, exec xdg-user-dirs-update, etc) but nothing seems to fix this. I think it's a bug in the Files version distributed with Ubuntu 21.04 (nautilus 1:3.38.2-1ubuntu2) so I filed a bug in Launchpad.

Solution 2:

I had the same issue after upgrading from ubuntu 20.10 to 21.04. My desktop icons were missing. I used the below commands and all the icons were back after restarting.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gnome-shell ubuntu-gnome-desktop