GNOME desktop isn't a desktop.

[tom]

In the major DE, windows & mac, the desktop is a desktop. It has files on it. If you click on the desktop, focus goes to it, and ctrl+n will open a new file browsing window (Mac Finder or Windows Explorer) and ctrl+shift+n will create a new folder. If you right-click on the desktop, you should be able to create a new folder, properties, restore missing files, open in Terminal, etc. It's supposed to be part of the desktop environment. However, in GNOME, the desktop doesn't feel like a desktop. It's theoretically the directory /home/USERNAME/Desktop, but in GNOME I can't start manipulating Files (Nautilus) by focusing on the desktop with a click nor an alt-tab.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Files and folders on the desktop ('nautilus-desktop') is enabled by default in Ubuntu 17.10.

Your system might have got it disabled for some reason, or you might be using the default Gnome theme where it's probably still disabled by default. Either way, the setting you want is:

Gnome Tweak Tool > Desktop > Icons on Desktop > Show Icons = ON

As for Ctrl+N, that's a separate bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=786908. Although Ctrl+Shift+N works already.

Please enable the above setting and let us know if the problem is resolved, or if there might be some other problem preventing 'nautilus-desktop' from running on your system.

[tom (tombuntus)]

That was it Daniel. Thank you. Quite bizarre to disable desktop by default. Any idea why GNOME chooses to disable normal desktop behavior by default?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

It's one of those Gnome design choices about cleanliness and minimalism. It appears Ubuntu in general disagrees with that choice so 17.10 enables the desktop icons.

Interestingly nautilus-desktop is an X app (running through Xwayland). It's the only part of the desktop that's not native Wayland. So if it sticks around someone will need to make nautilus-desktop able to run under Wayland natively.

[tom (tombuntus)]

I figured it was a GNOME design choice.

That is interesting. In general, Wayland seems to be a great source of pain and breakage. Does it have any large advantages? So far, I've only experienced more pain in Wayland than joy, but maybe there are some large advantages that are invisible to regular users like me.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Wayland is the architecture we want to use going into the future.

Wayland is also still relatively new compared to X11 (which is almost 30 years older). So there's a lot of catching up to do in the various software ecosystems.