Ubuntu 19.04 ".desktop" no longer working!?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

I may have misunderstood your question. I see now that you are talking 
about icons on the Desktop, not icons in the Dock which I had in mind.

Please make sure that the gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons package is 
installed.

And, when we are at it, if you are on a standard Ubuntu desktop, it's 
highly recommended that also the ubuntu-desktop package is installed.

-- 
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj