Get in touch:
01524 851 877
07718 896 553

Get Nautilus Not To Show The Desktop

Posted on Oct 21 2009

I have been an avid user of fluxbox for many years as my window manager but one tool I particularly like from Gnome is nautilus. The only problem I had with it is that by default it deals with drawing the desktop when it loads so my background settings disappear and it loads the standard Gnome desktop icons by default which I don’t like.

This is easy enough to solve as you can just use the following when starting nautilus from a terminal:

nautilus --no-desktop
This stops the default desktop drawing behaviour. Obviously this isn’t ideal if you want to launch nautilus from a menu so you can use the following tool to set this to be the default behaviour.

gconf-editor
Load this app then go to apps->nautilus->preferences. In that section there is an option named ‘show_desktop’. Simply uncheck this and every time you launch nautilus in the future it will load without messing around with the desktop.