Linux Mint: How to Configure Your Desktop Icons

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.

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.

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.

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.