Ubuntu – How to create a desktop shortcut in Unity

Why Unity was made default in 11.04 despite of obvious short-comings? Easy, although I'm not a representative of either Canonical or anything like that.

In April, Ubuntu 12.04LTS will be released. It'll be supported on the desktop for 3 years. Gnome2 is deprecated and we needed something new. Supporting the old desktop until 2015 was not a real option. It was decided that Unity is the way forward and because of the extra importance of 12.04LTS, it was important to speed up development -- exactly because Unity isn't ready for the masses. The easiest way of doing that, is to get it into the wild as soon as possible, expose it to a large audience and get lots of feedback and bugreports. That way, it can be made rock solid and polished by the release of 12.04LTS -- which is when Ubuntu will hit the fa... masses.

10.04LTS has been quite nice since the day it was released and I'd say it's perfect for most users. However, it is not very appealing. Even if it's a modern operating system, it looks somewhat dated. And that matters to a lot of users. When 12.04LTS is released, it will be just as stable, user friendly and efficient -- but it will be much more appealing. Unity is a lot more efficient to work with too, which is very important to heavy desktop users.

But this was already a difficult cycle because of other changes in the "ecosystem", such as the transition to Gnome3. If the introduction of Unity was to be pushed into the 11.10-cycle, then that would leave absolutely no margin for error when it comes to 12.04LTS, which after all is much more important. If you gamble that nothing goes wrong, then I will take your bet.

So in essence, you might say 11.04 is something like a beta for 12.04LTS and the LTS-es have to have significantly higher priority. That's what most end-users will stick to, and that's what nearly all businesses will use. That's what third-party software developers will develop for, what computer manufacturers will bundle, etc. But even if non-LTS versions get a lower priority, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be of high quality. Going from 10.04LTS to 12.04LTS is likely to be much, much harder than from 12.04LTS to 14.04LTS, so even if 11.04 isn't quite as rock solid as we would like, I'm confident that it is an exception.

All things considered, I'm really impressed by how well Unity works. It's come a very long way in a very short time.

As you can see, I picked one of your questions and answered it. As to the other ones, I didn't really understand them. But the launcher is for applications, not for files, folders or other things. You have the files and folders lense for that.

To add a launcher item that runs a single specific virtual machine we can create a new launcher item as it is described here.

In short, to start a Virtual Box machine without the Virtual Box Manager we may add the following command to start the VM in the Exec= section of a .desktop file we can place in ~/.local/share/applications:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=the name you want it to have
Comment=
Exec=VirtualBox --startvm 'name of the machine'
Icon=icon name
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true

After giving the .desktop file executable permission we can now start our virtual machine by double-click on it, or we can drag it on the Launcher or the Desktop for convenient access.

In more recent versions of VirtualBox the functionality to start a virtualmachine was moved to the VirtualBoxVM application. This needs a change of the EXEC line in the .desktop file tO

EXEC=/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBoxVM --startvm "name of the machine"

or we may use the tool VBoxManage startvm instead.