No one is forced to add anything to the Desktop.
The only things that show are the trash & home icons, trash can be removed. If the home icon is removed then it appears desktop support is effectively disabled.
The trash icon should be in the launcher, why the home icon is shown (for desktop support) is unclear
+1
This is not the place to discuss the upstream decision, but yes it feels like they (again) took a pretty dramatic choice without any user/usability testing. Only having a pretty wallpaper, seems like a waste of space. I cannot think of another OS (or DE) where you can’t put anything on the desktop. Sorry for the offtopic rant 
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Considering the largest amount of “desktop users” in the world use desktop icons, we are just “satisfying” small amount of desktop users with this no-desktop-icons attitude. No one had ever worked with a desktop completely free, at least a pen and a paper would be there. Why do you need a desktop, if you don’t use it? One might as well sit on the ground, but even on that you have to put something.
The whole idea is to have that icon on the desktop, so you can click on it and bang your app/file/folder would open.
Beautiful, but useless. (Panel autohidden)
And, this
is useful. The same desktop wallpaper, but with a desktop that can be used for daily work. You put things on the desktop, use them, and put them away. That’s what a desktop is for. At work, in the kitchen, in the basement…you need some place to put things on…to work with…
The same desktop background paper, a DE based on Gnome, and useful.
Take the desktop away from users, you chase the users away, period!
(This is 19.04, not 18.10)
On the other side, the desktop icons where most useful when the OS didn’t have a powerful search that gives the user everything he/she wants without the need of shortcuts on the desktop 
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It is again a question of “What is the target audience?”
It is the same question I would ask myself if I want to remove the dock from the desktop.
If it specialists, devs or power users are the target audience (I think POP OS targets that audience) than no desktop icons and no dock are a good idea, since those people may not use them because their hands are glued to the keyboard anyways and hitting the super/windows key to open the dash and search for “chr…” -> Chrome then hit enter might be what they do.
But when you target the “average Joe”/ Linux newcomer / any age (kid-grandpa) then no desktop + no dock might be a tiny bit too obscure and irritating. When you design software you need to know what your target audience is.
Long story short, it was a very good idea to provide dash-to-dock and a desktop for Ubuntu 17.10+, in my opinion.
I think the people who want to use Ubuntu but want to remove/deactivate the gnome desktop icons extension could be a rather small group and that group is very aware of how they can remove a .deb package.
So this would not hold me from preventing the extension to be put into 19.4 and thus providing an up to date nautilus + desktop.
If one keeps on using the “powerful search” to look for the kitchen knife, spoon and all other stuff all the time, one won’t get the dinner done…
By the way, what that folder named Desktop doing there in Nautilus at all?
I missing dragging an application on to the desktop and having it create a shortcut. This was very neat thing in Unity 7, and was helpful with older people. Drag their most used application(s) to desktop and tell them to click on it to launch, no fuss.
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You can actually do that. Just open /usr/share/applications folder and drag any application you like to the desktop. And, click on the file you get there. A notification window would jump up, click on the button “Trust and Launch.” The app would launch and the icon would appear on your desktop.
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If we place desktop icons on desktop, it is at least one step less before launching as most users are defaulted to desktop. If we do a time study, ie, time taken for various actions, time taken to launch favourites is much less if they are on the desktop.
For applications, there’s the dock, for files or folders I agree with you.
I like a clean desktop, but I am not against icons on it. I was just explaining why some people do not need it and might like a switch to remove them.
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In the standard Ubuntu desktop, there are 2 gnome-extensions built into it, with the Activities button far away on the top left corner. In a non-Ubuntu Gnome shell desktop with one major extension, Dash to Panel, all needed stuff is on one panel, (and while the hot corner on the top left is still there) you simply push the “Windows” button to get to the activities, or all the apps open - the apps minimized situation – less wrist strain. (True, that “Windows” button action is there in the standard Ubuntu too.) So, you can keep that D2Panel also (auto)hidden, having the whole laptop screen area for yourself. And, less apps draining the battery away.
I’m not sure advocating Dash to Panel as the Ubuntu default is appropriate for this thread? Start a new thread if you think Ubuntu should use that by default?
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Actually, old is better than newer iterations…the fork of Nautilus 3.4 is much nicer than 3.30…like old wine…looks quite nice on default Ubuntu too!
You can change the wallpaper through Settings, not by right clicking on the desktop, but that’s not a big deal, considering the pluses. Dual panes for example (below).
Maybe, there should be something Ubuntuish file manager, rather than what’s thrown at it…
I’ve opened an issue on your gitlab fork of the extension. https://gitlab.gnome.org/iainl/desktop-icons/issues/1
It would be so good if you pay attention. Thank you!
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If people want to go for more features rather than greater simplicity then they are welcome to either customize Ubuntu to do so or use a different flavour of Ubuntu (Kubuntu is the best option if one wants to go heavy on features by default). GNOME is about simplicity, Ubuntu made a few modifications to it just to keep familiarity with Ubuntu Unity (Dock, AppIndicator support, Ambiance then Yaru), otherwise Ubuntu generally has stuck with GNOME defaults upon switching to GNOME; I think going with Nemo over GNOME Files would be too much deviation from GNOME. Like I say, some are rather annoyed at Ubuntu for not going with upstream GNOME more often. I think you need to do more than prove that
to get Nemo as default in Ubuntu rather than Files. I’m not sure what you’d have to do to make the case for it, because just more features is not enough, that’s more KDE’s general philosophy (simple to use, powerful when necessary) rather than GNOME’s anti-feature-creep minimalist philosophy.
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Could we please get an up-to-date Yaru package into disco?
All those videos pop up on the internet with the old nautilus pathbar styling which is obviously broken.
And merry Christmas everyone
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I am running it on a test environment, and latest daily build (as of last week) of Disco Dingo has Nautilus 3.30, but no desktop icons yet. But the path bar (for current location) is not readable, as it dark font on dark background.
Don’t use disco-proposed. Packages there are not supposed to be ready.
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