Same here!
I thought I was hacked…I suddenly had new updates for Gimp, Putty, Bonjour, Pritunl, Xnview, Zoom, Audacity, Openoffice4, Filazilla…all of them created desktop icons although I have the programs in special folders. I did not even know what Putty is…and some other app that was updated, but I already removed because I was afraid I was hacked or had malware.
Today Opera was active in my taskbar although I never use it…and I also saw that Opera and Edge were updated.
How can I turn this off?
I prefer my OLD Audacity version with the UI I know…now it has some fancy new look etc.