Adam Niedling: That's a long story. Very briefly, about 2 years ago the GNOME project, which develops Nautilus, decided to remove support for desktop icons from Nautilus, controversially:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/gnome-desktop-icons-removed-3-28
Ubuntu still wants desktop icons, so it needs to implement them in some other way, and so it uses the Desktop Icons shell extension.
As Paddy mentioned above, there is a newer version of Desktop Icons called Desktop Icons NG, which is under active development:
https://gitlab.com/rastersoft/desktop-icons-ng
I myself run Desktop Icons NG too. It is still a long way from having all the functionality of Nautilus, but it is slowly getting better.
I also hope that Ubuntu will switch to Desktop Icons NG sooner or later.
Adam Niedling: That's a long story. Very briefly, about 2 years ago the GNOME project, which develops Nautilus, decided to remove support for desktop icons from Nautilus, controversially:
https:/ /www.omgubuntu. co.uk/2018/ 01/gnome- desktop- icons-removed- 3-28
Ubuntu still wants desktop icons, so it needs to implement them in some other way, and so it uses the Desktop Icons shell extension.
As Paddy mentioned above, there is a newer version of Desktop Icons called Desktop Icons NG, which is under active development:
https:/ /gitlab. com/rastersoft/ desktop- icons-ng
I myself run Desktop Icons NG too. It is still a long way from having all the functionality of Nautilus, but it is slowly getting better.
I also hope that Ubuntu will switch to Desktop Icons NG sooner or later.