18.04nautilus
Although Ubuntu 18.04 came with GNOME 3.28, it has Nautilus (aka Files) v3.26 instead of v3.28. The reason behind the decision is that Nautilus developers decided to get rid of the "icons on desktop" feature altogether from Nautilus 3.28, but Ubuntu developers wanted to keep the feature intact.
But I would like to use Nautilus 3.28 instead of 3.26. How can I safely (without breaking stuff) replace Nautilus 3.26 with v3.28?
For the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal fossa) the below actions are not needed, the package filemanager-actions is located in universe pocket. See fresh answer.
Daniel Marynicz has created PPA for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Nautilus, Caja and Nemo-enabled packages. You can install them as usual:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:daniel-marynicz/filemanager-actions
sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions-nautilus-extension # Nautilus
sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions-caja-extension # Caja
sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions-nemo-extension # Nemo
sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions* # simply all filemanagers
After installation you can launch fma-config-tool.
Modern version of Nautilus Actions (nautilus-actions package in trusty (14.04 LTS), xenial (16.04 LTS), artful (17.10)) are named as FileManager Actions (filemanager-actions package, it is not yet packaged in Debian and Ubuntu - see at repology.org).
If you do not want to compile packages by yourself - use links in the end of this answer.
So we can try to compile this package locally:
Install dependencies
sudo apt-get install build-essential gnome-doc-utils intltool \
libnautilus-extension-dev uuid-dev libxml2-dev libgtop2-dev rarian-compat
Note: if you need to support all three file-managers you should install two additional packages before compilation with sudo apt-get install libnemo-extension-dev libcaja-extension-dev.
Download, extract, configure, make (otherwise, if you prefer the easy way: use the deb file from links at the end of answer)
cd ~/Downloads
wget https://download.gnome.org/sources/filemanager-actions/3.4/filemanager-actions-3.4.tar.xz
tar -xf filemanager-actions-3.4.tar.xz
cd filemanager-actions-3.4
./configure
make -j5
Install package
Here standard way is to use
sudo make install
but this will not create deb-package (but you can remove fma with sudo make uninstall);
so using checkinstall is better:
sudo apt-get install checkinstall
sudo checkinstall make install
sudo apt-get install ./filemanager-actions_3.4-1_amd64.deb
After installation you will get new executable named fma-config-tool, its window is named FileManager-Actions Configuration Tool and looks like:
Below is the link to compiled package:
Best Answer
If you want Files 3.28 right now you can get the Nightly Flatpak (though that will automatically update you to 3.29 when that’s Flatpak’d).
GET IT HERE ----> https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-apps-nightly/plain/nautilus.flatpakref?id=7308f18578ac9d587ef82e1bae8b5e78b52f66aa
Reboot after installing and then when you click on Files in the Dash or Activities it will load up the Flatpak rather than the Deb. Please note that the Files Flatpak is very buggy (and they know that it’s buggy so don’t file bug reports for it). Alternatively you can get the Deb from Debian Experimental (which is highly likely to break your install although it could be less buggy than the Flatpak).
GET IT HERE ---> https://packages.debian.org/experimental/nautilus
You may want to wait for Files 3.28 to hit Debian Unstable or Testing (currently Buster) before getting the Deb from there (and it would still be risky to do so and not recommended). You could thus get 3.28 from Debian but it really isn’t recommended also because you’d get no automatic updates (not even security updates) for it.
Basically, for now, please wait for more progress on the Flatpak and snap!