Hide Desktop Icons – How to Hide All Desktop Icons in Ubuntu 12.04 and Later

Ok, I tried a whole bunch of things to my own question, over the course of about 2 hrs, so I'm not 100% sure something I did before this wasn't part of the solution, but this worked for me:

In a terminal, do:

rm -R ~/.cache/sessions/*
xfdesktop
sudo reboot

Source: Desktop icons not showing up in xubuntu (and I cant right click on the desktop)

Once I did the above and my icons all came back, I changed my background back to the original one, as it was one of the fancy photos after doing the commands above. Here's what it looks like now:

I think I also did the following things before doing the commands above, but I do not think they were necessary. Nevertheless, I'll include them here for completeness' sake in case they were unknowingly part of the solution:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install --reinstall tango-icon-theme tango-icon-theme-common

...along with many restarts as I tried various things. And I uninstalled nautilus too via sudo apt-get remove nautilus, as I had previously installed it as well.

The Desktop icon showed up finally, when I set the dconf path /org/gnome/desktop/background/show-desktop-icons to true (I disabled it with intention before).

This setting controls whether on the Desktop shows the files in the Desktop folder. But I seems also to control the appearance of the Desktop icon in the spaces side bar for whatever reason.

I wouldn't call it a proper answer to my question, but I think that's the best I can do at the moment.