desktop icons removed from Nautilus

[Adam Dingle]

As many of you are probably aware, Nautilus in master can no longer 
display icons on the desktop.   This change landed in Nautilus master 
on January 2nd:

       
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/commit/74dd9c9f72002d482c898a704bb5b95655e35e08

The reasons for the change are described at

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/158 "Remove desktop 
support"

That page says that it might be possible to develop a GNOME Shell 
extension to display desktop icons instead, and points to a prototype 
implementation which is in a "very early stage":

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/csoriano/org.gnome.desktop-icons

I personally am a bit skeptical about using a GNOME Shell extension for 
this, because

1) I doubt it will implement a desktop that looks/behaves exactly like 
Nautilus windows, and I value consistency.

2) it seems unlikely that it will implement all the Nautilus extensions 
that I commonly use (e.g. nautilus-image-converter, 
nautilus-fileroller) including property pages currently implemented in 
C (e.g.  libevince-properties-page, libtotem-properties-page).

In any case, it looks like Ubuntu has these choices:

1. Drop support for desktop icons, like in upstream GNOME.

2. Use a shell extension to provide desktop icons.  This is a large 
undertaking, and Canonical might need to implement this if nobody else 
steps up to the plate.

3. Fork Nautilus, or use an externally maintained fork such as Nemo 
(which itself might however have dependencies from Cinnamon).

4. Switch to a different file manager.

Has Ubuntu decided which of these paths to follow in 18.04 Bionic, and 
beyond?

Adam
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