Is it possible to permanently lock launcher icons?

I have installed Ubuntu onto my parents laptop. They are around their 80s. They manage to remove icons from the launcher accidentally again and again. I have to put them back manually, only to find them removed again two weeks later. Of course they'll swear "they did nothing like that". They also reorder the icons accidentally, so remote support becomes harder, although that isn't nearly as bad.

Is it possible to lock icons to the launcher so the user can't remove them? Just removing the option on the quicklist to unlock the icon would be fine.

Locking its position would be great too.


I assume you are talking about the Unity launcher.

I don't no way to lock the icons but there's an easy way to restore them:

Save the current icons to a file using

 gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites > ~/.launcher_icons

Now you can restore them using

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites "$(cat ~/.launcher_icons)"

Restoring the icons will close all windows for which there's no icon in the restored ones. So be careful.