I recently upgraded to Fedora 23 and got Plasma 5 in the process. I like to arrange the icons on my desktop into areas with icons grouped by function. I did have KDE 4.3 and this worked just fine. With Plasma 5 this does not appear to be the case. If I click properties for the desktop, the icon align options are Left or Right. How do I specify None? Trying to lock the icons does not work.

switch from folder view layout to desktop

I tried that and all of my desktop icons disappeared. How do I get them to show up in Desktop view? If I switch back to Folder view, the icons are there.

Thanks for the help.

If someone can explain better please do

in the desktop folder view layout icons (*.desktop files) found in the ~/Desktop folder are placed on the plasma desktop, in the desktop layout icons are saved and read from the plasma rc file are

if you add a folder view widget to the desktop layout they will show within the widget but probably displayed with the same rules/limitations as in the corresponding layout which is not what you want. suggestion add the widget then drag the icons to the desktop, remove the folder view widget and arrange the icon as you wish (I'm assuming this will work but have never had the need to try)

I added a folder view widget to the activity and dragged a few things over to the activity. The names became like "desktop:/Adobe". I cannot change the name or the icon associated with the item I dragged over.

Can I not use activities at all and go back to a simple desktop type environment that I had before I upgraded to FC23?

if you use the desktop layout you have what you had in 4 but you would have to rebuild the desktop icons to match 4's as best as I know

I don't remember what happened when I upgraded to 5 (thinking I just started from scratch but I've never used desktop icons). Did you have the same icons as before but they were in the folder view layout instead of desktop layout?

You could start a new thread asking how the plasma desktop upgrade is done and if there's a way to keep the desktop layout and icons

try this - switch to desktop layout -> open Dolphin to ~/Desktop -> drag the apps from there to the desktop

you should see the app icons and have them properly named on the desktop