If you want to change the special folder icons (xdg user directories), you'll have to change them by making a custom theme. They are set to a specific name which is provided by the theme, and based on which folders are set as your Music, Documents, Videos, etc… folders.
To set a custom icon name to use from the theme, for the ~/.wine/drive_c folder for example, you can run the following in a terminal:
gvfs-set-attribute ~/.wine/drive_c metadata::custom-icon-name folder-wine
This should make Nautilus use the folder-wine icon. However, this icon will not be used in GTK+ file selectors or other applications. To unset the custom icon name, you can run the following in a terminal:
gvfs-set-attribute -t unset ~/.wine/drive_c metadata::custom-icon-name folder-wine
Note, that if you've previously set a custom icon on the file, within Nautilus directly, you'll have to unset that icon. You can do this by opening the properties dialog for that file in Nautilus, clicking on the button with the icon on it, and choosing "Revert" in the file chooser dialog which opens up.
There are a couple of not that trivial ways to remove the "Starred" item in the left bar of nautilus. The second option involves editing source code and recompiling. I will only cover the first way here.
1 - Create a folder to store the override
mkdir ~/.config/nautilus/ui
2 - Extract the resource description of the main window:
gresource extract /bin/nautilus \
/org/gnome/nautilus/ui/nautilus-window.ui \
> ~/.config/nautilus/ui/nautilus-window.ui
3 - Edit the properties of the GtkPlacesSidebar object: open the file you created in the previous step:
gedit ~/.config/nautilus/ui/nautilus-window.ui
and change the property show-starred-location to false as in following code snippet:
<object class="GtkPlacesSidebar" id="places_sidebar">
...
<property name="show-recent">False</property>
<property name="show-starred-location">False</property>
...
</object>
4 - Set the environment variable to make GLib use this override:
export G_RESOURCE_OVERLAYS="/org/gnome/nautilus/ui=$HOME/.config/nautilus/ui"
5 - You also need to set this via ~/.pam_environment, because Nautilus is started via D-Bus:
gedit ~/.pam_environment
and add following line
G_RESOURCE_OVERLAYS DEFAULT="/org/gnome/nautilus/ui=/home/confetti/.config/nautilus/ui"
where you change "confetti" by your own login name.
(with thanks to JusticeforMonica and DK Bose for the hints)
You need to log out and back in before this will take effect.
Best Answer
An alternative for simpler files is to use Nautilus file manager to create a link and move it to the desktop.
For your word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents you can navigate using Nautilus to the directory containing the file. Then right click on the the file and select
Make Linka new icon appears calledLink to filename. Grab this and drag it to your desktop.Below is an animation for a word processing document called
eyesome.odtand a desktop link created for it:After the link is dragged to the desktop, simply double click on it and the application associated with it automatically opens it.
Keyboard shortcut method Ctrl+Shift+Left-Click
A quicker method is to use Ctrl+Shift+Left-Click on the file and drag a copy to the desktop.
The subtle difference is the Desktop name is no longer "Link to filename" but simply "filename".