Gtk4/libadwaita DING Desktop Icons New Generation

What is it?

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.

Other than using the Gtk4 toolkit, and now libadwaita, it has in addition, several new features, fixes and enhancements.

Features and Fixes

New Features and fixes are listed in FEATURES.md in this folder.

Issues

All issues are tracked on the GitLab web site. Please do a search through closed issues as well.

All known important issues are listed in ISSUES.md in this folder.

Requirements

• GNOME Shell >= 40
• Nautilus >= 3.38
• File-roller >= 3.38 or Gnome AutoAr (including gir1.2 files)
• Desktop folder already created
• GJS (Nix OS specifically needs this installed separately)
• GIR files for cairo and poppler are needed as well to render thumbnails locally. This should be available by default.
• For X11 xprop should be installed and executable, will work even without it, however things will work better and be more seamless without emulation if it is available.

Installation

The extension can be installed from [extensions.gnome.org](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5263/gtk4-desktop-icons-ng-ding/).

This should work out of the box for Debian, Fedora, SUSE

For Arch Linux, (and if needed, Manjaro), it is available in AUR [here](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gnome-shell-extension-gtk4-desktop-icons-ng). Default install from extensions.gnome.org should also work.

Manjaro Gnome desktop has this as a default installed desktop icons extension. A native maintained build is available in the Manjaro Repository that can be installed directly with pacman and other tools. [Download](https://software.manjaro.org/package/gnome-shell-extension-gtk4-desktop-icons-ng) from Manjaro Community Repository is available. Default install from extensions.gnome.org should also work.

For Nix OS, please see additional manual installation instructions in the section below.

Ubuntu requires manual installation, see instructions below.

For Slackware Linux, it is available in GFS here. Default install from extensions.gnome.org should also work.

Manual installation

The easiest way of installing DING is to run the scripts/local_install.sh script from the source directory (after changing directory to the source directory). The script assumes that it is being called from the base of the source directory. It performs the build steps specified in the next sections. It installs in the local home directory of the user.

scripts/system-install.sh is included for systemwide installation. Again, execute from base of the source directory. It performs the meson setup and ninja build/install steps detailed in a following section. This will also install an AppArmor profile for the gtk4-ding in the system /usr location and restarts apparmor. Super user privilges will be required. This does allow userns for gtk4-ding, see ISSUES.md

If there are special steps to build and install the extension and app on your distribution, please submit an MR to this Readme.md to help other users on the same distribution. Some NIX Os users were very helpful in doing that. Also, local_install.sh in the scripts directory does read /etc/lsb-release, and any variables set there are imported into the script. Any variations necessary to install the extension and app on a particular distribution can then be easily coded, based on those variables, at the end of the script (See the Ubuntu example there already). I will be happy to include all changes necessary for your distribution in that script. Please submit an MR for that.

Ubuntu

SYSTEM INSTALL

By default, Ubuntu does not allow userns privileges. Only apparmor rules in Ubuntu, can grant userns to specefied programs. These default rules are not defined for bwrap binary, Bubblewrap. This does not allow gnome-desktop library thumbnailFacotry to make thumbnails, and errors are logged. Gtk4-ding bypasses this by creating thumbnails for common image formats and pdf files - dependencies include gdkpixbuf, cairo and poppler. However, other xdg-thumbnailers installed on the system, for example appimage, ffmpgeg, audio, files etc will not work to render thumbnails through the gnome-desktop library.

Gtk4-ding will however, not write failure thumbnails, allowing other apps with appropriate AppArmor permissions like Gnome Files to render thumbnails if the desktop is opened in Gnome Files. These thumbnails will be displayed by gtk4-ding, if available.

A properly functioning version of apparmor-profiles that contains a new bwrap profile is still in the noble-proposed pocket. This should allow thumbnailing even for local installs. You can enable it by following the steps of this wiki.

See ISSUES.md for more information with app-armor.

System wide install for all users recommended as detailed in Manual install above, as Ubuntu has apparmor and userns restrictions enabled by default. The system install will install a apparmor policy for gtk4-ding allowing userns. This allows full functionality. See manual build and install with meson below or manual install with scripts/system-install.sh. Apparmor issue is detailed in ISSUES.md.

LOCAL INSTALL

If you are not interested in displaying thumbnails, local install works. If you disable apparmor, local install works with full functionality. A properly functioning version of apparmor-profiles that contains a new bwrap profile is still in the noble-proposed pocket. you can enable it by following the steps of this wiki.

In Ubuntu Jammy and later, the Ubuntu session is locked and only the default Ubuntu extensions run. Ubuntu runs it’s own Desktop Icon Extension which is based on the old Gtk3 branch. Therefore, locally installing the extension from extensions.gnome.org will not work directly. The local install script provided in the repository bypasses this and installs this as a manually installed local extension. The default Desktop Icons extension that ships with Ubuntu then needs to be deactivated, and this newly installed one activated. It shows up on top as a user installed extension in extension manager.

The other method to update to this newest version in Ubuntu is to install the “gnome-session” package using apt or other native tools. This enables the use of a standard, unlocked, non Ubuntu, gnome shell session. In that session install the following extensions from extensions.gnome.org:

• This Extension
• Dash to dock extension
• Appindicator and KstatusNotifierItem support extensions

That will recreate a desktop experience similar to the original Ubuntu desktop, but with the most recent versions of the extensions, and without the default Ubuntu Desktop Icons Extension. The session is also unlocked for other non Ubuntu extensions, so any other extensions can be easily installed using extension manager.

Nix OS

Manual Fix to enable extension (tested in NixOS 23.05, GNOME 44.2, gtk4-ding extension version 38). We need to add the following in the configs:

Install gjs-

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  gjs
];

Expose schema of nautilus-

services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.extraGSettingsOverridePackages = with pkgs; [
  gnome.nautilus
  #gnome.mutter # should not be needed
  #gtk4 # should not be needed
];

Logout and log back in. Enable the extension manually. For some reason, home-manager configs cannot enable the extension using dconf.settings.

Build with Meson

The project uses a build system called Meson. You can install in most Linux distributions as “meson”. You also need “ninja” and xgettext.

It’s possible to read more information in the Meson docs to tweak the configuration if needed.

For a regular use and local development these are the steps to build the project and install it:

meson setup --prefix=$HOME/.local/ --localedir=share/gnome-shell/extensions/gtk4-ding@smedius.gilab.com/locale .build
ninja -C .build install

It is strongly recommended to delete the destination folder ($HOME/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/gtk4-ding@smedius.gitlab.com) before doing this, to ensure that no old data is kept. It is also recommended to delete the local .build folder after the build is finished to clean up.

For system install:

meson setup --prefix=/usr --localedir=share/locale .build
ninja -C .build install

meson will prompt for superuser privileges for system install.

Installing with Puppet

If you want to install it in several machines using puppet, you must first create an installation folder in your local machine using:

mkdir install_folder
meson --prefix=`pwd`/install_folder --localedir=share/locale .build
ninja -C .build install
rm -f install_folder/share/glib-2.0/schemas/gschemas.compiled
rm -rf .build

The content of the install_folder needs to be copied to the destination computers at /usr install folder. After doing that, run sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas in each of the installed computers to update the schemas for that system.

Export extension ZIP file for extensions.gnome.org

To create a ZIP file with the extension, just run:

./scripts/export-zip.sh

This will create the zip file gtk4-ding@smedius.gitlab.com.zip of the extension, following the publishing rules at extensions.gnome.org.

Contributing

Fixes are welcome. Please post fixes and new ideas with an MR at GitLab. Post all issues there as well. Posting issues at org.gnome.extensions, in the reviews of the extension helps no one, those issues are not tracked, and unlikely fixed.

There are ESLint rules in the repository, if able, please run ESLint on all contributions so that they follow GJS/Gnome guidelines. The ESLint.json is in the repository. The eslint-gjs.yml and eslint-shell.yml files are in the lint folder of the repository.

Internal architecture, integration with other extensions, debugging

The internal architechture and integration with other extensions, as well as debugging is discussed in DEBUGGING.md in this folder.

Translations

Translations are welcome, the project uses gettext/ngetext, there are PO/POT files in the repository. You can help translate Gtk4 Desktop Icons NG on Hosted Weblate. Translations are only accepted from that web site, it is crowd sourced and translations need to be approved and voted on if anonymous, as they are less likely to have mistakes. It just takes two votes to accept the change. The site also uses machine translation engines. Also direct translations accepted to PO/POT files have broken the app and extension in the past and sometimes do not merge cleanly, the Weblate web sites creates clean PO/POT files that don’t break gtk4-ding and merge without problems.

Source code and contacting the author

For the Gtk4 Desktop Icons NG (This repository)-

Sundeep Mediratta
https://gitlab.com/smedius/desktop-icons-ng
smedius@gmail.com

Sergio Costas is the author for the Original Desktop Icons NG. His project and contact information is here, however any errors in the Gtk4-Desktop Icons are all mine, please do not spam him with problems from my fork.

Sergio Costas
https://gitlab.com/rastersoft/desktop-icons-ng
rastersoft@gmail.com