With the introduction of Gnome Shell in 2011, the Gnome developers decided desktop icons were tacky and got rid of them. There are some extensions to bring them back, but the Gnome developers are just and righteous in their arbitrary design tyranny.
Awful lot of Windows in this thread. Let me contribute. Yes, there are no icons because I didn't bother configuring it to display those, and I think it looks prettier that way.
history nerd shit
For the history nerds, I couldn't verify the picture with 100% certainty, but I'm pretty sure it's a picture from the control room in the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, the first grid-connected nuclear power plant in history (source 1, source 2).
It's possible that it's another power plant with a similar control panel. I'm not sure who the scientist are. Some sources I saw mention Igor Kurchatov as one of the scientists, but there's a whole myth about him never shaving his beard (which neither scientist pictured have) that I didn't bother to verify. Besides being in this project, Kurchatov helped build the first Soviet atomic bomb, and has a whole array of things named after him, notably the Kurchatov Institute.
In 1957 he received the Lenin Prize and four times the Stalin Prize and the State Prize of the USSR (1942, 1949, 1951, 1954). He was the hero of socialist work three times (1949, 1951, 1954).
2 years and 50+ different distributions have culminated in a Bazzite Ublue install that I am neither over excited nor overly annoyed about. I will never go back to GNOME though.
I prefer to just toggle into launchpad or use the taskbar usually since I've organized it well enough don't visit my desktop often since I usually fullscreen my browser/code editor
I have a ton of wallpapers rotating every 2 hours, so I'll chain comment with a few more screenshots, because I absolutely love some of the wallpapers I have and I want you comrades to see. I only took screenshots of drawn wallpapers, but I do have some nice brutalist ones and a lot of space and Arcane ones too.
I have things set up like this. Censoring for the privacy of others really, not for myself.
Large main screen on the left is what I sit in front of, the other 2 are side screens for chat stuff on the L of my desk.
I should really get a background or something I think this is one of the defaults? I almost never look at the desktop though aside from the small bar I used for Rainmeter on the right screen, so I've never bothered.
Icons and clutter strictly forbidden past this point!!
Huh, just noticed the bars look a little wonky on screenshot. The left one is all blurry and shit. They look a little different from each other too because the right screen is 4k scaled to 1440p, so I had to use an other font for it. But IRL it looks tight as fuck!!
basic ass laptop wallpaper i can't be asked to change, but in the process of cleaning up my desktop. i mainly mod gta (or pretend to know what the fuck i'm doing) and make my laptop go through hell running intensive games
My Debian desktop is boring as fuck (It's just the default KDE Plasma desktop with a few files because as a Linux user, we don't believe in desktop shortcuts), but some old Macbook that I have lying around is pretty interesting:
The Disco Elysium stuff is just me trying to install Disco Elysium on MacOS using Wine. It didn't work out.
I was able to install Diablo II, Grim Dawn, and Notepad++ on MacOS. Notepad++ wasn't able to save files though. You basically could only open files.
WineBottlerCombo was just me trying to mess around with Wine. In the end, I just used PlayOnMac, which is even more out of date than PlayOnLinux.
The stuff at the top was me trying to mess around with Diablo II data files. I wanted to see if you could have skill trees from different classes like in Grim Dawn. In the end, I was able to get a paladin with the necro summons tree, the druid summon tree, and shadow disciplines for the shadow master. The funny thing was every time the paladin tried to summon skeletons, he would take damage. And I'm not talking about taking damage like sacrifice, but the paladin would go into hit animation. My headcanon is that the paladin was a fallen paladin or something.
There's an awkward space at the right of the screen because I accidentally dropped the laptop the previous owner took poor care of the Macbook, so I can't see anything in that column of space. There's also an entire row of black that just so happens to be the same exact size and position of the status bar lol.