How can I keep my program groups on desktop?

If I make a program group, after restart its broken

First:

After building a group:

But after restart the computer, all is like before making the group. The same if I log out and log in.

What have I to do to keep the group?

Maybe you need to know that the computer is in an active directory. So the home directory is "/home/AD.LOCAL/username".

It took me a while, but I guess I found what you are looking for. I looked for something similar but somewhat different, however that solution works for us both.

You need to create a dconf-Database. To do that, you need access to the folders located in /etc/dconf/:

Create the database by creating the following file:

sudo nano /etc/dconf/profile/user

with the following content:

user-db:user
system-db:local

This shows gnome, where your settings are stored.

Next define, what your profile looks like. To do so create the following folder and file

sudo mkdir /etc/dconf/db/local.d
sudo nano /etc/dconf/db/local.d/my_style

and put something like this in:

[org/gnome/desktop/app-folders]
folder-children=['myfolder']

[org/gnome/desktop/app-folders/folders/myfolder]
name='Preferences'
apps=['app1.desktop', 'app2.desktop']

[org/gnome/shell]
app-picker-layout=[{'firefox.desktop': <{'position': <0>}>,'myfolder': <{'position': <1>}>}]

Then put a lock on these settings to keept the changes (however then they cannot be changed)

sudo mkdir /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks
sudo nano /etc/ dconf/db/local.d/locks/mystyle

with the following content:

/org/gnome/desktop/app-folders/folder-children
/org/gnome/desktop/app-folders/folders/myfolder/name
/org/gnome/desktop/app-folders/folders/myfolder/apps
/org/gnome/shell/app-picker-layout

Finally reload your dconf:

sudo dconf update

This will keep the changes alive for any user logging in. If you want to keep the changes only for you, make sure the environment variable DCONF_PROFILE is set to a profile defined by you. Then you can skip the first step and just name the db like your DCONF_PROFILE. (local is assigned to all users here. You need to skip the step system-db:local to make these changes not for the system, but only for you. Setting the DCONF_PROFILE variable should happen right after logging in to have any effect.)

If you are not allowed to do that on your system, you could run a script on startup doing exactly that.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.app-folders folder-children "['myfolder']"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.app-folders.folders.myfolder name 'Preferences'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.app-folders.folders.myfolder apps "['app1.desktop', 'app2.desktop']"

gsettings set org.gnome.shell app-picker-layout "[{'firefox.desktop': <{'position': <0>}>,'myfolder': <{'position': <1>}>}]"

However I do not know if the autostart-programs for ad-users are stored ;).

I know, I shouldn't ask questions here, but since my reputation is not high enough yet to make comments, this is all I can do...

How is your AD-System designed? I saw, that your origin country is Germany. Are you using a system like Linuxmuster to manage all clients? Could it be, that your OS is reseted to a certain state on every reboot? That is what I am doing with our computers.

Another reason might be that your settings could only be made on the local machine and all previous AD users are deleted whenever a AD user logs in. Usually only some folders are saved in the network drives like Dokuments, Pictures, etc. The personal folder is not always part of the network filesystem, at least not in our AD-configuration.

It would be nice to have a little more information about your system design to answer that question :)

///////////

REPHRASING

As far as I know, most AD-systems only share file storage folders, no system folders or files that applies changes to the system used by many users, so in the nature of an AD system it is common to revert changes to the OS that could affect other users. Grouping applications would be such a change.

Also keeping files of all AD-users that were logged in once would result in a lot of used HDD capacity lost to users that are not currently working on the computer, which leads to deleting AD-users on logout or setting back the OS to a certain state at some point.

Please check which folders the AD system mounts into the shared operating system and check whether it contains the necessary files to apply changes to the app-picker. If the changes made by you to build the application group are not in the mounted folders but in those folders on the system used by everybody or simply not stored in your shared space, they will be overwritten or simply deleted after you log out.

currently, I am using Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS x86_64 and it is fully up to date.
I grouped the applications like you have done in the image and restarted my laptop.
Everything is still working fine.

these commands might help:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
sudo apt clean
sudo apt autoremove -y