In MATE (I take it Gnome does not allow creating desktop icons), right-clicking the desktop background and clicking “Create Document” creates a file, but the file icon is placed below other icons on the desktop and not at the location where the cursor was right-clicked on the desktop.
Is there a way to have the icon appear at the cursor location? This used to be the normal behavior in MATE long ago, though I’m not sure if it was in Fedora or Ubuntu. I tried with and without “Keep Aligned” enabled and it made no difference.