Xfce Forum

uncolober

Member

Registered: 2016-10-28

Posts: 2

Nautilus as default desktop manager — is it possible? [SOLVED]

Hello! I googled and looked searched the forums, but I am still unsure how to do this properly.

I'm trying to set Nautilus to manage desktop by default.

Nautilus is the default file manager, but I would like it to also manage Desktop by default. What I mean is, right now Nautilus takes over the desktop after I launch it manually, but is there a way to automatically have it manage desktop instead of xfdesktop (if I understand the function of xfdesktop correctly)?

I actually like Thunar quite a bit, but on my noob system that's grown into a bit of a Frankenstein monster of distros it can be a bit glitchy at times (e.g. crashes while copying files, which doesn't seem to happen in Nautilus on my system), so after about a year of decent usage I'd like to try and switch back to Nautilus for a while.

Thanks a lot!

Last edited by uncolober (2016-10-28 14:24:08)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,492

Re: Nautilus as default desktop manager — is it possible? [SOLVED]

Hello and welcome.
Which distro are you running?

The basic procedure would be something like:
   In Settings Manager > Session and Startup:
      1. Make sure that you have no windows open or programs running (i.e. fresh login)
      2. On the "Session" tab, next to the xfdesktop entry, click on the word "immediately" and change it to "never"
      3. Click on "Save Session"
      4. In the "Application Autostart" tab, add a new entry to run nautilus to manage the desktop.
      5. Log out and back in again to test.

(Although, this doesn't seem to work in Arch Linux anymore - nautilus version 3.22 - it did work in earlier versions)

---

Please remember to mark your thread [SOLVED] to make it easier for others to find
--- How To Ask For Help | FAQ | Developer Wiki  |  Community | Contribute ---

uncolober

Member

Registered: 2016-10-28

Posts: 2

Re: Nautilus as default desktop manager — is it possible? [SOLVED]

I did it and it worked. Thanks a bunch and thanks for the welcome!

For whoever finds this post later (and incase this does something other than I think it does and I get corrected):

I did what's recommended above, and as for autostarting Nautilus, in order to prevent it from opening a window on start I used the following parameters for the nautilus command in "Application Autostart":

nautilus --no-default-window

This worked in Ubuntu 16.04 with Xfce installed on top of it from its official repositories (Xfce 4.12, Nautilus 3.14.3).