Some people do like having any icons on their desktop, others (like myself) abuse the desktop with hundreds of icons.  It is a matter of personal taste!

There is something that many people do not know, which can make the desktop much more useful!  When you create shortcuts on your desktop to applications, simply dragging a file on top fo that shortcut will force the program to open and, depending on the program, open the file(s) you dragged on it.

As an example, navigate in your start menu to where "Notepad" is shown and then right click on it and select "copy".  Next, right click somewhere on your desktop and select "Paste shortcut".  That is all there is to it!

Now, open up file explorer (for those that like keyboard shortcuts, hold down the windows flag key and hit E).  Navigate to a file any text type  (such as *.txt or *.log) and then drag that file over the top of the notepad icon you just created.  If you happen to make a mistake and it appears on your desktop, just drag it back into where you got it from and try again.  Once performed properly it will open the file in notepad.

Some might ask, why do that as the .txt files will open in notepad by default?  Yes, although this feature works with files that are not associated with notepad.  Of course, this is just an example, you can apply this to most any application.