My desktop no longer shows files, folders, or drives. I’ve gone through several different types of troubleshooting—nothing works. Lots of people online with 15.2 Sequoia are seeing this problem, too, but usually it’s related to Parallels Toolbox. I didn’t have that installed, and I have now removed the Parallels files I had on my drive (which were outdated but not running).
I can’t say I’ve seen that with 15.2 here.
Whenever my desktop stops showing files or drives, that tells me Finder has crashed (or I’ve accidentally quit it). Restarting Finder gets everything back to showing on desktop.
Yes, this is a new one on me. I did relaunch the Finder, restart, delete the desktop toolbar pref in macOS Recovery, too. No change. I’m not alone! But nobody has a working answer except that parallels one which doesn’t apply.
Not seeing this on an M1 Air. What model are you using?
M4, but it seems to affect a lot of different models. My M2 Max Studio Mac has no desktop problem.
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Check these settings (every time I installed Sequoia, it had this behavior):
Sequoia will default to this:
If “Always” is selected your desktop icons will only show in “Stage Manager” and not show on the “Desktop” unless you click on it.
(editorial comment restrained)
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Sadly, not this.
I have seen the above behavior a lot,* and it has always come down to this group of settings. Here, it was usually the setting I singled out, but sometimes it was a combination of the “Desktop & Stage Manager” group of settings.
*I have installed, deleted, and reinstalled Sequoia countless times, since its first betas.
I RUN Monterey.
Good luck!
Some questions to establish a baseline for further questions:
Are you able to see expected files in your Desktop folder, either by opening the folder in the Finder or by using ls ~/Desktop on the command line?
What happens if you boot in safe mode?
Do you use any Desktop syncing features in iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.?
Yes, the Desktop folder itself is normal. It’s like the Finder—except Finder windows—is broken. Definitely not a sync problem. Need to try safe mode still and creating a new account.
Check For iCloud Settings Changes – Another possibility is that the Sequoia upgrade changed your iCloud backup settings, causing your Desktop files to disappear. There’s an iCloud Drive option that syncs your Desktop and Documents folders across devices, which may be the culprit"
5 Ways To Fix Desktop Files Missing in macOS Sequoia - The Mac Observer.
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I don’t know what the full series of events was, but I was able to log in to a secondary account and the Desktop showed up fine. I restarted in Safe Mode. No Desktop in my main account. I wiped the Finder prefs and restarted. No luck. So I re-did the sudo chflags -R nohidden ~/Desktop command (which I’d tried previously) and magically, the Desktop is bad. Who knows!
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Inexplicable! I was going to suggest the secondary account test too, but it doesn’t sound like that revealed anything other than the problem being specific to the account.
Lot of reports of people having the same problem—enough that I think it’s happening frequently. But most people seem to have an easier time of solving it through one or two steps.
Try going to system- desktop&doc - desktop&stagemanager and tweak appropriate settings
Running 15.2 on mac mini m2 and no problems re dock
also check finder settings
Any chance you have One Switch installed?
I had the same issue until I remembered that I had enabled that option! 
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