Thunar currently lacks support to open .desktop files of Type=Link. This is because there's currently no preferred applications support for Xfce (see bug #1368), and because we lack a mime type that matches exactly these files and is a subclass of application/x-desktop. So to address this issue, fix bug #1368, add a mime type special/x-xfce-desktop-link, and register a program for that mime type, which simply runs the preferred application.
2006-01-31 Benedikt Meurer <benny@xfce.org> * thunar-vfs/thunar-vfs-info.c: Treat .desktop files of Type=Link as executable as well, and when requested to execute such a file, extract the URL and pass it to exo-open for further processing. Bug #1369.