Filesystem icons appear on both the launcher and desktop

[LostOverThere]

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.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Agreed, it's pointless when Unity is running, but has a lot of point when it's not - so Nautilus needs to be aware Unity is running and not display the icon on the desktop.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

I've added Nautilus as an affected project and raised a bug upstream. Hopefully they consider it as a problem.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Resetting to Confirmed since Unity bugs can't be considered Triaged until they have details on how to fix the bug.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Gnome developers have commented that this is not strictly speaking a problem in Gnome, and that:

"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)."

So indeed it should be a change in Unity which disables this setting which would be the solution to this bug.

[LostOverThere (lostoverthere)]

Considering this is the case, the easiest solution to this would be to set said variable to false, by default under Ubuntu 11.10.

Should be a relatively easy fix.

[Marco Biscaro (marcobiscaro2112)]

And if the user choose to use another desktop environment than Unity? The icons will not appear anywhere.

If Unity crashes by any reason and don't set that option to true again when its execution ends, the icons will not appear with other DE.

[Timothy Arceri (t-fridey)]

This seem to be fixed in the latest version of Onieric marking as fix committed.

@Marco
1. The Gnome developers have stated that they will not be displaying these on the desktop in future/current versions.
2. no other features are duplicated across the desktop just in case something crashes thats just sloppy.