Show and hide the home folder icon on the desktop

Many users prefer to adopt the desktop behavior like in GNOME 2 or others operating systems so they can still enable the classic desktop as seen on a previous article.

Like the disks volume icons and the trash icon also the home folder icon can be hidden or shown again if needed by executing a simple command. To hide the home folder icon you can execute the following command inside a terminal window:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.desktop home-icon-visible false

To show the home folder icon you can execute:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.desktop home-icon-visible true

The change is permanent and immediate so doesn’t require any restart.

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The desktop

Surely the very first thing you notice when you approach to the GNOME 3 is an empty desktop. Just a wallpaper background, no icons at all and, as you’ll soon discover, no pop-up menu if you right click on the desktop background.

If you’ve ever tried to save some files in the desktop folder (the exact folder name depends from the distribution, sometimes is called Desktop, sometimes is translated in your language like Escritorio, Scrivania or similar names) you could have found that your files won’t be shown in the desktop, like if it’s dead, unusable for everything.

Indeed the whole classic desktop in GNOME 3 should be considered as deprecated but many users aren’t still ready to abandon it so we’ll see here how to get the classic desktop back .