Comment 3 for bug 1875125

In addition to this bug, as an FYI to save time; the previous workaround many people follow is installing nemo and setting it as the default for desktop icons. This no longer works.

"gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false", is ignored.

The desktop icon functionality seems to now to be included in what are called mode extensions which a user cannot disable easily. No dconf key value is exposed for disabling desktop icons. It seems gnome-session needs to be installed and then extensions built up from there without desktop-icons as referenced.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/no-desktop-icons-already-arrived-in-19-04/9295/29
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/1

To clean up some of the mess one can do:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.desktop-icons

for the values "show-trash", and "show-home" which will remove some of the clutter if one has installed nemo as a workaround; but files are still shown (but not interactable) with no simple way of disabling it.