Home Directory as the Desktop?

Charles Jones charles.jones at ciscolearning.org
Fri May 15 17:09:53 MST 2009


Dazed_75 wrote:
> What genius decided that the users home directory should also BE the 
> [gnome] Desktop?  Doing so means that every file and directory in a 
> users home directory appears on the Desktop.  One does not notice it 
> on finishing the install because there are no visible files there.  
> Makes me wonder how many people we did installs for at the installfest 
> are now being bothered by this weird setup.
>
> I do not know how widespread this is but I found a number of 
> discussions about it on the web.  A scratch install of ubuntu 9.04 
> seems to do this though an upgrade does not.  I THINK the change is 
> related to the new install having a ~/.config/ that looks like:
>
>     # This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
>     # If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
>     # interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
>     # Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
>     # homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
>     # absolute path. No other format is supported.
>     #
>     XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
>     XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/"
>     XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
>     XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/"
>     XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/"
>     XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/"
>     XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
>     XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/"
>
> instead of
>
>     ---<snip>---
>     #
>     XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
>     XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
>     XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
>     XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
>     XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
>     XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
>     XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
>     XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos" 
>
>  
> I don't know how or why that happened, but I also noted the absence of 
> .bashrc and .profile which I thought were supposed to be made (copied 
> from /etc) by default for every user?  This almost makes me wonder if 
> the change was intentional or possibly poorly vetted. 
>
> Anyone have any inside info about this?
I've never seen that...my Gnome desktops has always been under 
$HOME/Desktop.
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