Missing compact icon layout option in Nautilus

[Bakhelit]

Compact icon layout feature was removed in Nautilus 3+. As I understand it's design decision, but there is a problem that it causes if you want to have launchers/icons on desktop. It is not possible to apply compact view or any similar feature which delivers the effect close to original compact layout. This makes nautilus nearly useless file manager for handling the desktop, because launcher/icon labels are wasting too much space and often collide with other launchers/icons sitting next on the desktop.

I hope there are still people who use desktop for something more than place for a wallpaper. It seems to be the trend with "modern" Linux DEs - maybe because it looks better on screenshots. But it is actually completely useless for work and I don't know why a file manager needs to be used for handling a desktop, which can properly show only a wallpaper anyway.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, where did you see that feature was removed? on precise with nautilus 3.4 the view menu bottom has those options:
* icons
* list
* compact

ctrl-3 change the view to compact as it should

[Bakhelit (bakhelit)]

Here is screenshot explaining what I described in the bug report above, I hope it is more clear now.

[Bakhelit (bakhelit)]

Now I also updated to Nautilus 3.4 and it is still the same as depicted on screenshot above.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Seems like upstream dropped that option, there are already 3 choices of view, and text bellow or beside icons and zoom level, it's enough combinaisons to support, we don't plan to add back the settings you describe in an Ubuntu specific way, you can try to argue on the GNOME bug tracker about its utility though