Zen & the Art of the Computer Desktop

I was fed up with all of the mounted network drives appearing on my desktop so finally got around to turning them off. This is my default setup on my macbook but I hadn’t set the same behaviour on Ubuntu. Luckily I was spurred to fix this by an article on zenhabits.

The process is straightforward:

1. Start the Gnome Configuration Editor $ gconf-editor
2. Navigate to /apps/nautilus/desktop/
3. Set the volumes_visible tickbox to false to turn off the visibility of mounted volumes

You can go further and turn off all of the desktop icons which is very neat but interferes with conky which is bad as conky is my new favourite thing at the moment:

1. Start the Gnome Configuration Editor $ gconf-editor
2. Navigate to /apps/nautilus/preferences/
3. Set the show_desktop tickbox false to turn off the visibility of files stored in the /home/$user/Desktop directory.