[enhancement] Allow files and links to be put on the Unity8 desktop

[Emanuele Antonio Faraone]

enable the use of the desktop as in unity 7 . then adding the possibility to put files on the desktop

[Emanuele Antonio Faraone (emanueleant03)]

see this bug

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

In case anyone is wondering, in Unity7 it's not the shell that implements this. We use 'nautilus' which takes over and renders the desktop window by default. Although maybe in Unity8 the story would be different...

[Emanuele Antonio Faraone (emanueleant03)]

but is very important!!

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

Incomplete in unity8 until UX gives an opinion

[Vesa Rautiainen (vesar)]

Unity 7 style desktop has not been on top of our priority list recently in design team but I acknowledge that this feature is something that many users would like to have. So we're looking into this and I would expect this to land in Unity8 at some point.

[Emanuele Antonio Faraone (emanueleant03)]

when?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

On one hand, I do get it not being part of the plan.

On the other hand, Unity7, Gnome, Windows and Mac OS all have this. It's an expected "desktop" feature to be able to put things on the desk-top :)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

As a workaround in future you should be able to open the Unity7 desktop file manager in a Unity8 window by:
   nautilus -w -- --desktop_file_hint=unity8

However nautilus is crashing right now. Looks like a simple bug 1603923

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The nautilus crash is now fixed in yakkety. The only blockers are now Unity8's launching mechanism and general GTK bugs [1].

With that in mind you can use this hack to launch nautilus under Unity8 on yakkety:

  mkdir -- '--desktop_file_hint=nautilus'
  nautilus -w -- --desktop_file_hint=nautilus

It will refuse to resize and be of limited use right now, but it's a start.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+3.0/+bugs?field.tag=gtk-mir

[ventrical (dale-f-beaudoin)]

Also works in zesty.