The screenshot button in gnome says that it does this when you hover over it: "Take a screenshot of your desktop". I didn't want to take a picture of my desktop - it's just flat grey anyway, so a screenshot of that wouldn't be overly useful. I wanted to take a screenshot of exactly what I saw on my screen - literally, a screenshot - of the application that currently is in view and would hence obscure the desktop. In conversation with other people on irc, it transpires that it in fact, the screenshot button does take screenshots of the actual screen, and not the desktop. The claim that it only takes screenshots of my desktop is untrue and inaccurate. The only way this would be the case would be either if I'm not running any applications at all, or had moved to another of those four rectangles on the bottom of the screen, or if I had pressed the button on the bottom left of the screen that says "Click here to hide all windows and show the desktop". Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Be in Gnome, have something you want to screenshot (other than the desktop). 2. Look around everywhere for a means of doing this, ignoring of course the button under 'Actions' menu, as it claims to only screenshot the desktop. 3. Have other people point out that it actually does do what I wanted in the first place. Actual Results: I was able to screenshot my application and dialogue box with the error, and it didn't simply result in a screenshot of the desktop, as I was initially led to believe on my own. Expected Results: It should say "Take a screenshot of your screen." instead. Somehow.
there are bugs and bugs... and this is one of the latter category Anyway, at least in 2.9 there is no mentioning of 'desktop' to confuse users in the 'screenshot' tool. Maybe you're not alone. Wait a little bit more and you'll be happy, until then try to wrap your mind around it for as long as the inconsitency still lasts.