Long story short, last month, near the Christmas holidays, GNOME developer Carlos Soriano shared his plans on removing a so-called “the desktop” feature from the Nautilus file manager starting with the upcoming GNOME 3.28 release of the desktop environment, proposing its integration into the GNOME Shell component. The feature is there to handle application icons on the user’s workspace, but it shouldn’t have been implemented in Nautilus in the first place, according to the developer. So for the GNOME devs to be able to add new features to the Nautilus file manager, they need to remove its ability to handle desktop icons and place the code somewhere else.