A total Zorin noob here! Just moved from Windows 10 to Zorin 17.3 last week, and everything is working great, but today I noticed something odd.
I'm using Thunderbird. When I drag an email attachment on to the Desktop, there is no indication that the file was placed on the Desktop; however, it is displayed in the Desktop folder via the file manager, so it is clear it was copied out of Thunderbird.
In the file manager, if I move the file from the Desktop folder to the Downloads folder and I drag it out of the Downloads folder and on to the Desktop, it will appear both on the Desktop and in the Desktop folder.
I have Desktop icons enabled, and if I create a new file directly on the Desktop, the icon will appear.
If you installed Thunderbird from the Software store, there's a good chance that the package format selected was Flatpak. It's a long story, but basically there are multiple ways of installing software in Linux, each with their own pros & cons.
What you are describing sounds like this might be the case, since Flatpak package have restricted access to certain directories in the file system by default.
Let's check real quick by launching "Terminal" from the application menu and running the following command:
flatpak list
Make sure to maximize the window first, otherwise the output will be truncated and hard to read. In the output, if you see org.mozilla.Thunderbird listed, that means you have it installed as such.
Assuming that's the case, you have two options:
Install another package called Flatseal. You will use this to grant additional permissions to the Thunderbird package so that it can access the desktop and whatever other directories from your home folder that you need. To make things simple, I'd recommend selecting the entire home folder:
Uninstall Thunderbird, and re-install it using the Debian package format. This format is much more stable but packages are not updates as frequently, and therefore you will not have the latest features of Thunderbird available. If you are okay with this, you can do this easily from the Software store, paying attention to the source drop-down menu under the Install button (this is from another example):
Oh, sorry I forgot about that. Long story short: by enabling access to the rest of your user's home directory, Thunderbird thinks that there's no profile created (because it searches for a profile folder in a few dedicated places in order).
We can fix that easily. Close Thunderbird, and open up the terminal again. First, make some backups, just in case:
You should now be able to launch Thunderbird and use your account as it was previously setup.
If everything seems to work fine — and only if everything seems to work fine — you can delete the two folders that appeared in your home directory named "thunderbird_old" and "thunderbird_new".
Completed the rest of the steps, and alas, issue persisted
I sincerely appreciate all your help, but I'm thinking option 2 to just reinstall Thunderbird is best. All my accounts are IMAP, so not the end of the world.
All right, that's good. I was hoping this would fix the problem altogether but maybe the problem is not really with how Thunderbird is installed... although we can still test one more thing.
In Flatseal, assign Thunderbird the permissions:
D-Bus session bus
D-Bus system bus
These are near the top, under the "Socket" category.
Okay, I closed Thunderbird, toggled these two items on, restarted Thunderbird and still the files do not appear on the desktop (but do in the Desktop folder).
So mysterious!
I've just installed Thunderbird myself to give it a quick test and, turns out, it worked fine right out of the box without needing to change anything. Apparently I was way off thinking this might have been an issue due to the package format
Just to confirm (as I don't use Thunderbird and I'm not familiar with it) I'm opening the email, expanding the attachment list, and just drag & drop from there to the desktop, right?
Can you try to simply restart the extension, toggling it off and back on?
# Disable it...
gnome-extensions disable zorin-desktop-icons@zorinos.com
# Wait a few seconds... and enable it again
gnome-extensions enable zorin-desktop-icons@zorinos.com
Not sure if this helps at all, but here's a screen shot of my screen. You can see the 4 icons that appear on the Desktop. And in the Home/Desktop folder you can see there are more files there than are displayed on the Desktop itself. Could it be a permissions issue?
Last bit of info. I created a folder on my Desktop called "Email Drop". And if I drag an email attachment from Thunderbird over the Email Drop folder, the file is saved in that folder as one would expected.
Makes me think something is up with the permissions on the Desktop "folder".
Well, this is embarrassing.
I have a two monitor setup. And the screen resolution was set in such a way that when I was dragging attachments out of Thunderbird, they were being placed on part of the 2nd monitors screen area that was "off canvas" to use a web term.
When I re-scaled my monitors from 125% to 100% -- duh, there were all my attachments.
I want to thank you for all your help, I feel so bad that this was the problem all along....
Well, first of all, excellent troubleshooting. I was already on my way to test if the quoted filenames had anything to do with it...
I had also noticed that the desktop doesn't like to drop files anywhere, and sticks to the grid order which I remember other people complaining about (and here's another good reason for it). So I'm actually bookmarking this thread for future reference, I'm sure it'll come up again.
Don't worry too much about it, that's just the Linux way! And trust me, it will happen again...
Here's me taking months to realize that 40 is bigger than 4
