GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 653225
Drive icons shouldn't be displayed on the desktop if they are already displayed by another part of the shell
Last modified: 2011-06-27 20:44:17 UTC
This is a downstream bug report from Ubuntu "When attaching any form of removal storage (such as a USB stick, or external HDD), Ubuntu places an icon to such devices on both the launcher and desktop. This is pointless, as there is no reason for there to be two icons. Ubuntu should ideally place file system links on the launcher, and not the desktop, by default." I know this is one of those things that's probably more of a hassle to fix than it's worth but it's worth tracking anyway. Though the bug report mentions Unity I believe Gnome3 shell has the same form of redundancy (though not positive, haven't used it in a bit)
(In reply to comment #0) > This is a downstream bug report from Ubuntu What is the URL of the downstream bug? Please add it to the "See Also" field.
I believe this is a bug in Unity (or in the version of Nautilus shipped with Unity) rather than Nautilus. - with GNOME 2.32 you don't have any other icon for devices, and the desktop is always visible, so it works as intended - with GNOME 3.0 you don't have any desktop by default, so there's no redundancy. Icons for plugged devices will show up in shell search results - with GNOME 3.2, we will likely have something like this [1] (and of course, still no desktop), so there's still no redundancy. You can "fix" this by setting the "org.gnome.nautilus.desktop volumes-visible" to false in GSettings, or the correspondent GConf option in 2.32 (which is probably what the Ubuntu package should do, if they already show the volume icons elsewhere). [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/cosimoc/2011/06/23/hotplug-hotness/