I was vaguely aware there was something newly leaky about gnome-shell in buster, but hadn't looked into it in any detail as logging out and logging in again every few days would fix it.
However, I just upgraded my last stretch machine to buster. That has a "power user" with a densely populated desktop of files and folders (on the order of a hundred items, several gigabytes), and within an hour of use their gnome-shell had expanded to the sort of bloated size which takes me (with a handful of files on the desktop) many days to reach. Thinking it must be something to do with their desktop habits (and thereby this extension) led me to this bug. Upgrading to the latest extension version (15) for the 3.30 shell on the gnome extensions site does appear to fix the issue. Mainly mentioning this in case it has some bearing on the "severity" assessment; it does have the potential to hit heavy desktop users quite hard (until they change their ways, anyway). Maybe worth also worth mentioning that there does seem to be some considerably increased clunkiness/"flashing"/repainting of the desktop compared with squeeze's icons-on-desktop behaviour, which I think must be something to do with issues like https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/desktop-icons/-/issues/58 https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/desktop-icons/-/issues/120 but so far as I can tell it looks like the fixes for that are in versions of the extension for more recent gnome-shells. Thanks to everyone working to make Debian awesome Tim
