How to enable Nautilus desktop management in Gnome Shell?

I'm using Gnome Shell with the following extensions: weather, dock, window-navigator, user-theme, alternative-status-menu, noa11y. I checked "Have file manager handle the desktop" in Gnome Tweak Tool, at first the desktop icons were shown regularly, but upon reboot they went awol. Is there anything else I need to do or could it be a conflict with any of my extensions? Thanks for your time.

Solution 1:

Unfortunately, this is by design.

As per this blog post on the design of gnome shell:

TL;DR/summary: the desktop metaphor sucks. We are stuck with a limited surface, limited file management tools, and a background that actively impairs legibility of the files sitting on it (unless you’re using a solid black background).

As such, it was removed from gnome shell as far as I can tell.