Have you ever had the Gnome desktop suddenly show every folder and file in your home directory? Have you ever nuked the ~/Desktop directory (intentionally or not) and wondered later why all of the files and folders in your home directory show up on the Desktop?
This has happened several times to me and I finally figured out what was causing it. It turns out that the ~/Desktop directory is the important connection. If you remove it, intentionally or otherwise, be prepared for everything in the first level of your home directory to show up on your desktop. Recreating ~/Desktop does not fix it.
Compliments of the Ubuntu forums I found the solution:
1) Open ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs with a text editor
2) Make sure this line reads as follows: XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
Maybe someone else has the solution to this problem: why are 95% of the solutions I find for Fedora in the Ubuntu forums and how can we fix that?
January 30, 2010 at 9:10 am
Uh, typo. I mean “clean”. I have directories for Documents, dev(elopment), some photos and tmp dir. Music and movies are stored in /home/common, as they’re shared between users. My variables are set correctly: % xdg-user-dir VIDEOS
/home/common/movies
January 29, 2010 at 8:37 pm
If you keep your ~ clear then where do you keep all the stuff?
January 29, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Ubuntu put a lot of effort into marketting, which made them more popular than most distributions.
January 29, 2010 at 4:32 pm
But there’s nothing bad about finding solutions on the Ubuntu forums 🙂 You can almost every time use the solutions on other distros as well. So I see no reason to “fix that”.
I agree with Adam though 😀
January 29, 2010 at 1:50 pm
OTOH, I prefer to set my ~ as desktop. Pros: one layer of indirection less (~/Desktop is gone) and it kinda forces me to keep my ~ clear.
January 29, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Ubuntu forums ranks quite high in search results as they’re very big and busy. There’s often a reference to a Fedora location further down the results.
The trouble with the Ubuntu forums is there’s usually two wrong answers for each right one 🙂