Desktop Icons For The GNOME Shell Are Back With Beta Extension

For those of you that have missed the ability to have desktop icons on the GNOME Shell desktop since the support was dropped from Nautilus, it's now sort of back thanks to GNOME developer Carlos Soriano.

Soriano has shared that his GNOME Shell extension for restoring this functionality is now in beta. The Red Hat developer has been working on restoring the ability to have desktop icons to satisfy Fedora/RHEL users in the "classic" desktop mode. He's spent the past few months working on an extension to provide this functionality and now it's considered beta ready.

Icons are displayed on the desktop, the ability to execute or open files, drag/drop, cut/copy, open-in-terminal, and other bits are in place This can also work with Wayland sessions. But to enjoy the desktop icon extension, you need at least GNOME Shell 3.28 or newer but more pressing is the latest Nautilus nightly builds, such as the nightly Flatpaks.

More details on this much desired extension can be found via Soriano's blog.