Preparing for the change from Unity to Gnome Shell in Ubuntu 17.10 I have installed Ubuntu Gnome on a spare PC. Most differences in default behaviour are either acceptable or can be modified to suit my personal taste, but I can't figure out how get the Files launcher in the Activities Dash to behave as it did under Unity in 17.04 (and before).to org.gnome.Nautilus.
Specifically, In Unity the context menu after a right click includes shortcuts to the folders listed in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks. In Ubuntu Gnome these shortcuts don't show in the context menu. I tried adding Actions of the form
[Desktop Action Documents]
Name=Documents
Exec=nautilus --new-window ~/Documents
to org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop, but although they showed in the context menu, Nautilus never opened the folder.
Also I had to do this to the system file /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop since when I put a copy in ~/.local/share/applications and modified it (so it also used a different icon) the system version was used in the Dash. (This technique worked with Unity.)
What have I missed?
After some more googling with some different variations of my search terms I have found a "solution," or more likely, just a work around that may not work for everyone. Editing copies of the desktop files from /usr/share/applications that I put in ~/.local/share/applications I changed the line
to
and now every thing works. I must admit I don't completely understand what this does. Also, be warned I'm using an X11 session. I'll try to test this under Wayland, but I suspect I'll have some different problems because I use gksudo to launch Synaptic and its ilk.