MacOS – Finder Preferences: Unable to hide items on desktop

desktopfindermacos

I prefer my desktop to be as empty as possible. So the first thing I do whenever I get a new Mac is hide all items on the desktop (hard disks, external disks, CD's and servers).

On my Mac from work, I am unable to disable "Show these items on the desktop" in Finder Preferences. When clicking the checkbox to hide "hard disks", the checkbox unchecks and checks back on.

What could possibly prevent me from disabling this?

This Mac is managed and configured by our IT department, but I don't wish to contact them for this "non-issue" 🙂

Thanks

Best Answer

Your description is consistent with your IT department having deployed a configuration profile to your computer that controls your Finder preferences. If you go into System Preferences and open the "Profiles" preferences you may see the configuration profiles installed on your computer. I would expect to see one called "MDM Profile" and one or more that configure other aspects of your computer, such as the Finder.

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There is an option in path finder to hide finder's desktop and replace it with a version provided by path finder.

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In the terminal, do this:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false && killall Finder

After this, there'll be nothing on your Desktop (but still in ~/Desktop, i.e. your Desktop Folder). It'll look like this:

Clean Desktop

Beautiful, isn't it? If you want to change it back:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true && killall Finder

enter image description here

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