Gnome disabled OOTB support for managing Desktop icons, and is now handled via a gnome shell extension that is missing many features and not quite usable.
The best solution I found so far was to install nemo (file manager on Linux Mint) and make it the default instead of Gnome Files (formerly nautilus) and let it handle the desktop icons as well.
- Disable the Desktop Icons extension (from Gnome Tweaks -> Extensions) if it already exists
- Install nemo:
- sudo apt install nemo
- Make nemo the default file manager and disable nautilus control of desktop:
- xdg-mime default nemo.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search
- gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false
- Add nemo-desktop to your startup items
That’s it, Enjoy!
Source: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/07/how-to-replace-nautilus-with-nemo-file.html
Just Some Techie Notes! 
After a recent update against 19.04, stale duplicated icon files (unclickable and unmovable) appeared on desktop. All previous steps used to work up to this. I am finding no solution over the internet…. this nautilus has become inappropriate for ubuntu, they should adopt nemo themselves.
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I switched to KDE anyway, much smoother
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The second answer got rid of the duplicates for me.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1140250/how-to-remove-all-desktop-icons
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Awesome I just did it on Ubuntu v20. Love Nemo used Mint for quite a while then decided to try Ubuntu in a VM. Linux – always changing core system apps like file manager and also Renaming them from the bizarrely named and hard to spell Nautilus to Gnome Files.
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