Dragging a folder from Places menu to the Desktop copies the folder to the Desktop instead of creating a shortcut

[nicolas]

1) Open the "Places" menu in your Gnome menu-bar, at the top-left of your screen.
2) Choose a shortcut, your home folder, for instance.
3) Try to drag&drop it towards your desktop. You want of course make a launcher to it on your desktop.
4) No. Ubuntu (or Gnome, in fact) try to copy entirely the folder's content to the desktop !

It's one an ergonomic detail really, really troubling. The only way I know to make a shortcut like this is to open gconf-editor and find the good line in it. While this simple drag&drop could do the same thing ! (and, seriously, there is no one who could want to be copy all the content of his home to his desktop, in any case so easily).

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

Dragging an application launcher from the menu to the desktop creates a shortcut for launching that applications. We may need to test this, but my intuition is that users do not expect that dragging a folder from the Places menu to their Desktop will copy the entire folder there. Created a shortcut is a less surprising, less weighty outcome.

[w30 (dickrichard1)]

I would rather see the ability of the left mouse click on the desktop that allows the user to create a launcher to be expanded to have the ability to create an icon that launches nautilus with the users home folder opened when he chooses his home directory. At present the launcher app can navigate to users home folder but when choosing /home/<user> the app opens home and asks for an item in /home/<user>. Allowing <home> to be a choice and setting up a launcher icon to open your file browser in home or whatever directory was chosen would be nice. A new user could fathom that. It does not bother me as a sophomoric (as opposed to freshmen) user because the launcher can be created by simply typing in "nautilus /home/<user>" in the box and picking a favorite icon for the launcher. Linux is so difficult because there is often times no Linux user in the next cubicule or next door for a new user to ask. The Linux learning curve is parabolic because we are spread out. Sometimes I do want an actual copy of a directory easily made available on my desktop and not a link especially if I intend to modify a whole subdirectory tree and then replace the original if all goes well so don't make an actual copy creation difficult to placate the "link creation drag and drop to match Microsoft crowd".

[Radoslav Georgiev (valsodarg)]

I agree with this bug, the *dragging* from task bar action should be treated just like dragging a file or folder and the user should be presented with:
Create Shortcut,
Move,
Copy,

Perhaps, create shortcut should be hight lighted (default).

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

This bug is a duplicate of bug #62529 which was reported long time ago. It was also reported upstream (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357934)