How to hide all desktop icons in 12.04 and later?

Question

In 11.10 Using Configuration editor, one used to be able to edit a boolean parameter named : Desktop_Show This allowed to hide/show all desktop icons. This latter was removed in 12.04.

Someone, knows how to hide desktop icons automatically?

Thanks

Solution 1

It's in gsettings (& dconf-editor), to do from cli use

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false

From gui open dconf-editor (install dconf-tools) as in screen

Solution 2

The MyUnity application (in the software center) has a lot of useful features for customizing Unity, including the ability to hide desktop icons. The newest version supports 12.04.

Solution 3

If you are using the Gnome desktop environment then

1. Open the Tweak tool
2. Click on the Desktop tab
3. Toggle the "Icons on Desktop" button to off.

Comments

[Wilf]

This looks answered anyway, but that looks like gconf-editor, which is probably why it did not work...

[Hanynowsky]

Thanks for the response. I already have MyUnity, Ubuntu Tweak and Unity Settings. What they offer is to show/hide (home, network, trash and computer) icons. While, I am interested in hiding all icons in dekstop (files, folders.....etc).

[Esso]

(Bumpy bump!) When I use this is the final version of Ubuntu 13.04, I can only bring up the launcher one time if the desktop icons are disabled. I then have to alt+TAB to a window, then back to the desktop to bring it up again. The launcher works normally in applications.

[mpb]

On Ubuntu 16.04, show-desktop-icons seems to get reset to true every time I log out. Additionally, in order to hide the icons, I need to killall nautilus and then restart nautilus after running gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false. Perhaps I am doing something wrong?

[Flimm]

This should work in both Unity and GNOME Shell