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Linux Mint: How to Configure Your Desktop Icons

Linux Mint: How to Configure Your Desktop Icons

December 9, 2020 by Mel Hawthorne 5 Comments

Your computer’s desktop is the first thing that you see when you sign-in to your computer. Your desktop icons can be an important part of easily and quickly access the files you want. Linux Mint comes with a fairly minimalistic desktop by default. Many users may assume that it only has two icons, “Computer” and “Home”; however, this isn’t quite the case. If you connect any external or removable drives to our Linux Mint machine and mount them, the mounted drive will appear as a desktop icon too.

How to Arrange the Dekstop Icon – Linux Mint

To configure your desktop icons in Linux Mint, press the Super key. Then type “Desktop.” Before you hit enter or click on the entry, ensure that the option you have selected has the blue icon and says, “Manage your desktop icons” at the bottom. The other option with the green icon opens your “Desktop” directory.

Tip: The “Super” key is the name that many Linux distributions use to refer to the Windows key or the Apple “Command” key while avoiding any risk of trademark issues.

Press the Super key, then type “Desktop” and select the entry with the blue icon and the “Manage your desktop icons” label.

Desktop Icon Settings

The first setting you can manage is “Desktop Layout.” The dropdown box lets you choose to have:

  • No desktop icons
  • Only show desktop icons on the primary monitor.
  • Show desktop icons on every monitor apart from the primary monitor.
  • Show desktop icons on all monitors.
You can configure which monitors you want your desktop icons to display on.

The next set of options, “Desktop Icons,” lets you choose which icons you want to appear on your desktop. “Computer” offers a shortcut to the different drives on your computer. “Home” adds a shortcut to your home directory. “Rubbish Bin” provides a shortcut to the recycle bin. “Mounted Drives” shows a shortcut to any mounted drives such as USB sticks, external hard drives, and optical storage media. “Network” enables a shortcut to any configured network storage drives.

You can choose which of the default desktop icons you want to appear.

The final setting, “Show icons from missing monitors,” is used to indicate if you want icons that are supposed to be on a monitor that is not currently connected to be automatically moved to the currently connected monitors. This option is only handy for computers that use multiple monitors and can be ignored for purely single monitor systems.

You can choose if you want icons to be automatically moved from monitors that have been disconnected.

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Filed Under: Linux

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jerry Warrington says

    February 15, 2023 at 4:19 pm

    I wish Mint would follow the Main Stream in regards to icon shortcuts. It sure would save a lot of time and frustration. When you get upward of 50 or so links that all look alike and work from three different PCs it is frustrating and time consuming and not intuitive to get where you want to go quickly and easily.

  2. Ron Purcell says

    July 21, 2022 at 11:00 am

    Using Linux Mint Cinnamon my desktop icons wander out of their grid positions between startups, and there is no apparent way of locking them into place. Autoarrange is NOT useful since it rearranges their sequence which I do NOT want. This is not a critical work-stopper, but is a symbol of poor programming..

  3. hb says

    December 19, 2021 at 2:53 pm

    I have too many desktop icons and would prefer to have a list instead of icons. Can it be done, if so, how? Thanks

  4. Koe says

    November 10, 2021 at 9:06 am

    I tried the super key and select desktop ,I still can’t decrease the size of the shortcut icon on my desktop for linux mint 20.2 I installed days ago. Pls help. Thanks.

  5. Lannes says

    July 3, 2021 at 12:17 pm

    How does that change the desktop icons?

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Baby and Daddy My name is Mitch Bartlett. I've been working in technology for over 20 years in a wide range of tech jobs from Tech Support to Software Testing. I started this site as a technical guide for myself and it has grown into what I hope is a useful reference for all.

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