Desktop Icons
Utilities

Desktop Icons

Display icons on the GNOME desktop

Website

Description

Gtk4 Desktop Icons NG is an extension and a program together for the GNOME Shell

that renders icons on the desktop. It is a fork from DING.

Desktop Icons NG (DING) by Sergio Costas itself is a fork/rewrite of the

official 'Desktop Icons' extension, originally by Carlos Soriano.

This new Gtk4 extension was originally submitted upstream to the DING project as

a merge request. It was not merged for quite some time with development

continuing on both branches simultaneously. The branches started diverging

significantly, and further, the new commit's in the original DING branch were

not easily adaptable to changes already made in this gtk4 branch. That made it

very difficult to rebase and merge all the new changes to the original branch.

A mutual decision was therefore made to continue independent development of both

branches. Important bug fixes from branches are still back ported and

forward-ported between them. Therefore there are two extensions available, the

classic DING that uses Gtk 3, and this newer fork based on Gtk 4 and libadwaita.

This fork of DING is ported to use the Gtk4 toolkit, and now has been ported to

libadwaita. This, and the original DING can both be installed together, but only

one can be activated at a time in the extension Manager. They use different

install directories and GSettings schemas, therefore preferences set in one will

not carrry through to the other. This is to avoid trampling on the stable branch

and isolate errors from this branch.

Version

v100.18Mar 18, 2026