spinning mouse cursor when having nautilus manage the desktop

[frodo99]

When using the gnome-shell desktop environment in Ubuntu (tested on 11.10 and 12.04) there is an annoying bug with nautilus regarding the mouse cursor on nautilus startup.

When you start nautilus by clicking on the gnome-shell-icon the mouse cursor will keep spinning for at least half a minute. (sometimes there also is a spinning wheel on the top panel.

This happens only when you have nautilus handle the desktop.

I have found out when the bug occurs and when it does not:

Bug occurs when:

clicking the icon on the gnome-shell-panel
clicking on the icon of the gnome-extension (Frippery Panel Favorites)
clicking on the link to a subfolder of the homedirectory using the gnome-shell extension All-in-one-Places
clicking on the notivication which appears when inserting a harddrive of some kind

Bug does not occur when:

clicking on the link to the homedirectory using the gnome-shell extension All-in-one-Places
clicking on a direct desktop icon to the home folder or any other folder
starting nautilus via terminal

I also tested this using the ubuntu server version (12.04) and installing the hgnome shell manually without any unity files

This bug does not occur on Fedora or any other distribution using gnome-shell, therefore I assume it must have something to do with Ubuntu and Nautilus.

[frodo99 (openwork)]

Debian 7 is also affeced by this bug

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[frodo99 (openwork)]

Additionsal requirements for this bug to occur:

On Ubuntu 12.10 alpha 3 this bug only appeared when automatic logon was activated. When entering a passwort bevore loon the bug did not appear. Probably has something to to with the keyring?

[Stinger (e-mindahl)]

Confirming bug on 'Ubuntu Gnome Remix' 12.10, Nautilus 3.6.0

Only present if 'file manager handles the desktop' I can switch that off and on from the Gnome-tweak-tool.

The timer/spinner keeps spinning for a while when launching Nautilus from the menu/launcher. (If you look closer in the menu, Nautilus is launched with the '%U' parameter, 'nautilus %U').
If I launch nautilus from terminal (no %U) or remove %U from the menu, Nautilus just instantly springs into action.

[Stinger (e-mindahl)]

I found two Debian bugs about the same issue, seems to have been around for a while, the first bug is with Nautilus 3.2.1

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668862

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=689161

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) reached end-of-life on April 28, 2017.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test.

[Paco Raxim (raxim1)]

A similar problem happens on 18.04.1 while loading a text file.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1805551