Repository navigation
Desktop Icons Disappear on Multi-Monitor #2596
Description
Cinnamon 3.2
OS: Arch
X; Nvidia Driver
Running a triple monitor setup, with icons on all 3 screens. Randomly icons disappear.
In order to restore, required to visit Desktop Settings, Disable Icons on all Monitors, and then Reenable Icons on all monitors.
Reacted by Dušan Šušić, Francesco Borzì and sme
Activity
Wini-Buh commentedon Nov 18, 2016
I think it's the same problem I described here linuxmint/cinnamon#5973. I could reproduce it easy with help of a virtual machine (I used VirtualBox to check if the problem is reproducible).
At least your work-around to disable icons on all monitors, and then re-enable icons on all monitors works for me (at the moment).
itzexor commentedon Nov 20, 2016
Pressing F5 with the desktop focused will refresh it and make the icons show up. Not a solution but a more convenient workaround for the time being.
moretocome commentedon Dec 12, 2016
Same problem as described, thou disabling and re-enabling the icons does nothing, nor does pressing F5 with desktop focused.
Cinnamon 3.07
Linux Mint 18
Nvidia driver
xonxor commentedon Dec 26, 2016
I can confirm this problem with my 3 monitor setup as well. Both above workarounds provided by OP and @itexor work for me (certainly not long term solutions). This issue first appeared when I upgraded to 18.1 using the upgrade manager. Never had any problems of this sort in Linux Mint 18. The Cinnamon version I'm using is 3.2.7 and I use the Nvidia proprietary driver.
carontiello commentedon Jan 6, 2017
Same problem and pressing F5 on desktop focused, in the meantime, work for me.
Cinnamon 3.2.7
Linux Mint 18.1 x64
Intel Integrated Graphics Controller with triple monitor
jameshibbard commentedon Jan 23, 2017
Same problem here. Mint 18.1, cinnamon. F5 fixes it for me, but more often than not the icons are in random positions.
LaurentOngaro commentedon Jan 27, 2017
same problem, 3 monitors, icons disappear randomly, F5 or changing icon settings can fix it
mint 18.1 x64
cinnamon 3.2.7
AMD HD 7850
primawill commentedon Feb 19, 2017
I am also having this problem. Linux Mint 18.1 Dual monitors, AMD Phenom II x4,Nvidia GTX260, Cinnamon 3.2.7
jameshibbard commentedon Feb 20, 2017
Bizarrely, I have found that arranging desktop icons in vertical lines (not horizontal) means that they don't get rearranged when I press F5
mariuszpass commentedon Mar 6, 2017
I am also having this problem. Dual monitors with diffrent resolution:
first one: 1920x1080, second one 1080x1920
primawill commentedon Apr 3, 2017
As it turns out, I think I may have found out what is causing the problem. I prefer to have my primary monitor on the Right side, and use the left side as my secondary. Upon switching the left to primary and right to secondary the issue went away.
So I experimented with swapping the cables on the monitors thinking whichever monitor was plugged into the DVI-1 spot should be as the primary. That is not the case. Problem still persisted whenever the right side monitor was made the primary, even after swapping the cables.
So my conclusion: If you are using dual monitors, the left side should be the primary and the right side secondary.
nsoulantikas commentedon May 13, 2017
My setup:
Kernel: 4.4.0-77-generic x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 5.4.0)
Desktop: Cinnamon 3.2.7 (Gtk 3.18.9-1ubuntu3.3)
Distro: Linux Mint 18.1 Serena
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Thames [Radeon HD 7500M/7600M Series] bus-ID: 01:00.0
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
Resolution: 1366x768@60.02hz, 1920x1080@60.00hz, 1920x1080@60.00
3 monitors and the desktop icons disappear when i turn off the primary monitor. It mostly happens for the right click not to work. Initially i switch the monitor settings (where to show icons) but the right click stops functioning.
feugy commentedon Apr 14, 2018
What Nsoulantikas describe is still with cinammon 18.3
t-hofmann commentedon Feb 6, 2019
Setup:
Symptoms on right monitor:
regardless of which monitor is the primary.
Side-note: Using xrandr to scale and position, but no difference if beeing executed or not.
FrancescoBorzi commentedon May 1, 2020
I'm having the same issue using Nemo on Ubuntu 20.04 with 2 displays.
I managed to mirror the icons by right-clicking on the empty desktop and choosing "Customize". However, now I can no longer find a way to open the "Customize" options of my desktop.
EDIT: actually it's not mirrored, but I have to press F5 in order to update one desktop whenever I drag an icon to another desktop
2 remaining items
robertwhitton commentedon Dec 17, 2020
I should have added that I obtained the above results in LM20/Cinnamon 4.6.7
felagund commentedon Jan 8, 2021
Any time I unplug a monitor from my laptop, icons get missing. F5 brings them back, but their positions get reset :-(.
Ubuntu 20.10, under Unity.
Auravendill commentedon May 1, 2021
I think, the bug I have is mostly the same, although the results are a bit different: (Nearly) everytime the lockscreen/screensaver starts or sometimes after a reboot, all the icons get reshuffled in some way. Sometimes they all appear only in one quarter of the main screen, sometimes they are banished from the main manitor to the two smaller ones . If this happens they are even sometimes overlapping or at positions, that the grid wouldn't allow.
At least sometimes f5 returned the order to the one, I created.
cinnamon 4.8.6
nemo 4.8.6
Debian 11
Kernel 5.10.0-6-amd64
AMD GPU
s-m-e commentedon Apr 3, 2022
Another "me-too". Dual-monitor setup, right-hand-side monitor is primary, icons are supposed to be arranged in rows. I am running Linux Mint 20.3 with Cinnamon and all updates as of today applied.
The expected unexpected behavior: After logging out and logging back into Cinnamon (with or without reboot in between does not make a difference), all icons are gone. Sometimes, only the files and folders are missing - stuff like "trash", "home folder" or "network" may actually appear instantaneously, though this happened only a few times.
Workaround: The F5 trick works for me; all files and folders show up again while their original position is lost.
Clues: When hitting F5, the previous positions of files and folders are "lost" - but not those of other stuff like "trash", "home folder", "network" etc. The latter icons come back in their previous spot. The files and folders show up in rows starting from the top left corner. Interestingly, they appear to maintain some kind of stable order across many logins - it's certainly not alphabetical or similar.
Can I help? I'd love to have a look at the code. I'd greatly appreciate if someone could point me at the (potentially) relevant sections.
mtwebster commentedon Apr 25, 2022
No, it's not.
It's difficult for nemo to distinguish between events that change the size of the area that's available to place icons.
Sometimes these events can be triggered multiple times in quick succession. Each time any of these events occurs, nemo needs to decide whether this change is temporary or permanent and what to do about stored icon positions - it's trying to maintain the user's desired spacing while keeping the icons centered. Clearly it falls down in this decision-making at some point.
A great deal of time was spent at one point trying to improve the desktop experience by allowing you have a variable placement grid, layout direction, primary/all monitors, etc.. which I think works for most people but utterly fails for others - although we tried to do our best to handle this case, it seems to be those users with monitor layouts that change frequently.
I have one or two relatively simple ideas that may help this situation that I'll try to maybe get a test build out soon.
I really appreciate the offer. Unfortunately it's complex to the point that I'm going to have to spend a few hours refamiliarizing myself with the relevant sections of code just to work on these changes. The toplevel 'window' is
nemo-desktop-window.c. Most of the desktop layout handling occurs innemo-desktop-icon-grid-view.c,nemo-icon-view-grid-container.c,nemo-centered-placement-grid.c. Each monitor is a canvas with the icons positioned from the upper left corner. All position info is stored in a file's metadata (you can view it usinggio info <filename>. The metadata for the desktop itself, which stores grid spacing, auto layout, etc... is in~/.config/nemo/desktop-metadatas-m-e commentedon Apr 25, 2022
Other than for trouble-shooting this issue, I have not changed my layout at all. So this kind of does not hold up for me at least.
My system can not hibernate in any form, so it's just simple logout/login sequences or reboots. Monitors attached via DVI to Mini-DP-port adapters. Open source AMD driver on AMD card, by the way - on Nvidia-GPU-based systems with proprietary driver I do not see this issue ironically, also Mint Cinnamon with really similar configuration. I am saying this because the Nvidia driver was/is infamous for causing such issues in KDE. Interestingly, for the Nvidia drivers to work properly, one usually needs to disable kernel mode setting, which remains on when using AMD open source drivers. Maybe this is another clue.
Let me know if I can help, even if it's "only" by testing your builds on my system.
gio info <filename>and~/.config/nemo/desktop-metadataare two interesting pointers - thanks. So thedesktop-metadataappears to be mostly reliable in my case while the stuff in the files' metadata somehow always falls apart.Interestingly, the longer I use Cinnamon, the more often I see events where all desktop icons actually survive a logout/login sequence and no pressing of F5 is required. It's about a 1 in 20 chance in my case, but no real pattern. A timing / thread issue?
Speaking about files' metadata: Where / how is this information stored? We're not talking about xattr, are we? Instead, it's the stuff in
~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/, I presume?mtwebster commentedon Apr 25, 2022
Yes it's kept in gvfs-metadata.
I remember first getting some monitors where I could finally try out displayport with my nvidia card.. and a couple of weeks later I was digging thru my box-o-cables to switch back to hdmi and haven't bothered again since. Half the time I couldn't get one or both monitors to wake up after they went into powersave. Also ref linuxmint/cinnamon-settings-daemon#178. This sort of behavior also would mess up my desktop icons as well.
Would you mind giving me the output of:
and the contents of
~/.config/nemo/desktop-metadataYou mentioned F5 causing repositioning, but it should actually have no effect, and doesn't for me, no matter how I set up my desktop. So I'm a bit curious about that.
Thanks
mtwebster commentedon Apr 26, 2022
I suppose I wasn't clear enough.
Nemo sees the desktop 'view' as a location expressed as
x-nemo-desktop:///(for comparison, the root of your filesystem isfile:///. This location doesn't really exist anywhere, except in nemo at runtime, so it usesnemo-desktop-metadatato store information about the each monitor (in the file, see entries labeled[desktop-monitor-nn]- things you can customize about the view.There are a few icons on the desktop that also don't exist anywhere except - Computer, Trash, direct links to mounts. If you modify these, that data also gets stored in
nemo-desktop-metadata, for lack of anywhere else to put it. The 'Home' folder is treated like a special folder also for the purposes of the desktop, even though it is real.On the other hand, actual files and folders have their metadata stored by gvfs with the files themselves. You'd have to monitor those individually to see their metadata updating (
man gio).so:
nemo-desktop-metadatagithub-actions commentedon Mar 2, 2026
This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had
any activity in over 2 years.
If this issue is still relevant:
If no activity occurs in the next 30 days, this issue will be
automatically closed. Issues can be reopened if needed.
jameshibbard commentedon Mar 2, 2026
9 years later and this issue (kinda) still persists for me.
I'm now using two 4k monitors which I have scaled up to 150% via System Settings > Display.
While this doesn't happen with anything like as much regularity as it once did, from time to time Cinnamon will take some of my desktop icons (images, usually, but also PDFs and text files) and pile them all one on top of the other in the top left hand corner of my monitor.
I'm using Linux Mint 22.3, Cinnamon 6.6.7