Why is my desktop menu missing create launcher?

Could log a bug

I just submitted a bug report. Thank you.

How is this a bug?

In your bug report you referred to your "Unity desktop." But the desktop is provided by Nautilus, not Unity. In GNOME 2, the menu item you referred to existed but it created an icon on the desktop, not in the panel or anywhere else. This menu item is no longer present in the GNOME 3 version of Nautilus, presumably because it is assumed that users will launch applications using the interface provided by their shell (GNOME Shell or Unity / Unity 2D). The absence of this feature in Nautilus 3 is arguably a bug (I am inclined to think it is, and I would indicate myself to be affected by a bug about that), though it was intentional on the part of the developers (see bug 723861). If the intention behind your bug report is to say that it is a bug that you cannot create desktop icons that launch applications in Nautilus 3, then you should clarify that in your bug report, target the bug to the package nautilus, and then provide additional information (which will include your configuration and Nautilus version, in case this behavior turns out to differ from system to system) by opening a Terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and running "apport-collect 880796". But before doing any of that, you should read through bug 723861, see if there is already a bug reported for this issue, and also read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs carefully, which should help you to decide exactly what you want to change your bug report to say.

You can still create custom Unity launchers, of course, but I am not aware of a comprehensive guide for doing so. So if you want help with that, please let us know *what* it is that you want to customize. Unfortunately, some customization requires manual editing of text files. I would refer you to http://askubuntu.com/questions/13758/how-can-i-edit-create-new-launcher-items-in-unity-by-hand, but I am guessing that is where you read about the technique for creating the launcher on the desktop first. It's true that this technique used to work, but that it doesn't work in a desktop environment that doesn't support desktop icons to launch applications is not actually a bug in Unity. The change in behavior was not produced by a change in Unity, and there is no change that could be made to Unity itself to restore this functionality.

Though this is not officially supported either, you might be interested in using https://launchpad.net/unity-launcher-editor to create custom Unity launcher icons.

Thank you for the explanation and terminology clarification, it was confusing.

If it was the developers decision, good or bad, to leave it out then it is not a bug. I will amend the bug report I filed.

In one of the links you provided, I cannot remember which one, someone advised using the following command to create a launcher.

   gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new foo.desktop

It worked fabulously well and I now have a solution. The inability to easily add custom launchers to GNOME 3. I have yet to see the value in the whole new look and feel to Ubuntu/Unity except that it may be more Apple Mac like.

"I have yet to see the value in the whole new look and feel to Ubuntu/Unity except that it may be more Apple Mac like."

You might be interested in using a different interface. There is GNOME Classic (GNOME 3's legacy-like interface, called "GNOME Fallback" in many other OSes), which looks like (but is not the same as) Ubuntu Classic from Ubuntu 11.04 and earlier. Xfce also resembles Ubuntu Classic and GNOME Classic, and LXDE somewhat resembles it (and can be configured to resemble it further). KDE is not just a new interface, but a separate desktop environment that provides different applications, but you can generally run GNOME apps in KDE if you have GNOME installed too (which you do). And there is the GNOME 3 Shell, which is sort of like Unity, which does not look any more like a GNOME 2 desktop than does Unity, but which you might prefer.

For GNOME Classic, install the package called gnome-session-fallback and select "GNOME Classic" or "GNOME Classic (no effects)" as your session type at the login screen (to bring up the drop-down menu for this, click the gear icon). For Xfce, install the package xubuntu-desktop and select Xubuntu (not Xfce) at the login screen. For LXDE, install the package lubuntu-desktop and select Lubuntu (not LXDE) at the login screen. For KDE, install the package kubuntu-desktop and select Kubuntu (not KDE) at the login screen. For the GNOME 3 Shell, install the package gnome-shell and select GNOME at the login screen.