My desktop icons disappeared when I upgraded to Ubuntu 21.10

After upgrading my machine from Ubuntu 21.04 to 21.10, the desktop has no icons. Even the default Trash and Home icons are not visible. How can I bring back the icons?

env | grep XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP outputs:

XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=ubuntu:GNOME

Solution 1:

Ubuntu 21.10 uses a different gnome shell extension to provide icons on the desktop, "Desktop Icons NG" rather than "Desktop Icons".

That the upgrade process did not correctly replace the package gnome-shell-extensions-desktop-icons with the new gnome-shell-extensions-desktop-icons-ng is related to your specific configuration and the fact that the old extension is not anymore packaged in Ubuntu 21.10.

With "your specific configuration", I suspect that following customization from your part some standard metapackages (eg. ubuntu-desktop) may not anymore be on your system. In that case, the new package is not pulled in together with the updated metapackage. However, the old package is removed because it does not anymore exist in the new version. If you do have the metapackage, however, then this is to be considered a bug in the upgrader.

The solution is to manually install the new package:

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons-ng

You may need to activate the extension using the Extensions tool. Install it with

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-prefs

Start the tool searching for "Extensions".