Comment 12 for bug 1159430

Jeremy, thanks for this info. I didn't realize there was a gnome-settings-daemon plugin that could draw the desktop background - fascinating. In Raring we have gnome-settings-daemon 3.6.4 where the background plugin is present, but it looks like vanilla GNOME removed it in 3.7.90:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/NEWS

So we'll need to patch it back in if we want still want it when we move to a newer gnome-settings-daemon.

I thought that in GNOME Shell mutter draws the background with a bit of direction from gnome-shell. At least that's the way it seemed to me from looking around the code a bit. So I'm not sure why the gnome-settings-daemon background plugin would be needed in that environment, though you say it actually might be.

As for me, I want to run Unity with a background wallpaper and icons on my desktop, all in a world with GNOME 3.8 packages from your PPA. As you pointed out, that doesn't seem to work yet - if show-desktop-icons is true then I see a white background even when org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.background active is true. Hm - not sure why that is.