GNOME developer Carlos Soriano announced today that the forthcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment is bringing back the beloved GNOME Classic mode that allows users to use desktop icons.

Earlier this year, the GNOME devs decided to remove the ability of the Nautilus (Files) file manager to handle desktop icons, stating with the GNOME 3.28 release, promising to bring it back as soon as possible through a new implementation in the form of a GNOME Shell extension.

As expected, users were skeptical about the new implementation if it will offer them the same level of convenience that the previous method provided via the Nautilus file manager. We said it before and we'll say it again, desktop icons are he to stay for many years and they are not going to disappear.

Microsoft uses desktop icons on Windows, Apple uses desktop icons on macOS and even implemented a new desktop Stacks feature on the upcoming macOS Mojave 10.14 release to help users keep their desktop icons organized. Most GNU/Linux distributions use desktop icons and will use them for years to come.

GNOME desktop icons are back and are greater than ever

With the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, GNOME developers are bringing back desktop icons and it looks like they are greater than ever thanks to the integration with the Nautilus file manager for all operations, pure Wayland support, and last but not least proper multi-monitor support.

"For Fedora and RHEL we have had an option called classic desktop, where desktop icons and some shell extensions were enabled. It’s useful to bring to those users an option that works better than what we had with Nautilus, so as part of that I spent my time at Red Hat working on providing this," said Carlos Soriano.

Of course, the new GNOME desktop icons implementation will let users enjoy the standard file operations, including to open files, execute desktop files, drag and drop to reorder icons without overlapping, open files in a terminal emulator, cut and copy files, add shortcuts, as well as to undo and redo file operations.

Rubber banding selection will be available as well, and you can try desktop icons right now if you can't wait until early September when the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment will be available for your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. All you need is to install the latest Nautilus release using the nightly Flatpak builds on GNOME Shell 3.28, and then install the Desktop Icons extension.

GNOME 3.30 desktop right-click context menu

GNOME 3.30 - selecting icons on the desktop