No icon desktop

[Moltke]

Pardon me for my senility
Sometime time ago I used a release of some linux product that allowed me to disable the icon from a launcher and just use the words themselves.
I am looking as to what desktop that was?

By way of explanation.  Now that I am senile I can no longer look at an Icon and associate it with something physical.  That includes colors and other things that require cognitive skills.
Thanks for any help you can give, this maybe the last stop before god old "PCdos" where I started .

If I understand correctly, you want text instead of icons on your desktop? Hmmm ... I don't think that's possible, at least not in xfce, however, you can adjust font size making the text bigger:
1 Right-click on the desktop and from the context  menu select Desktop Settings
2 In the window that pops up, select the icons tab
3 Under appearance, tick the box righ where it reads custom font size
4 Adjust the font size as per your needs.
5 Click on close

Hope this helps!