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I think at some point I might have accidentally moved the Desktop folder onto my Pictures folder, and when I noticed I reverted it. But ever since then, the icons shown in my graphical desktop are of the files and folders in home.

I am on Ubuntu 17.10 with gnome. Tried turning off the option Show Desktop Icons in Tweak Tools and then turning it back on, but it didn't do anything.

My theory is that there was a symlink of some sort that changed, or was deleted, when the Desktop folder wasn't where it was supposed to be. But I don't know where to look to be able to fix it.

Thanks!

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  • What's the output of ls -dl ~ ~/Desktop?
    – nxnev
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 21:18
  • drwxr-xr-x 42 mariel mariel 4096 dic 18 17:23 /home/mariel drwxr-xr-x 4 mariel mariel 4096 dic 18 11:19 /home/mariel/Desktop
    – M.O.
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 21:20

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I have finally found an answer here.I have restarted my computer and now everything is behaving as it should.

The problem seemed to be in the file~/.config/user-dirs.dirs: there was a line appearing like XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME" when it should have made reference to $HOME/Desktop.

Why or how it changed I dont know.

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  • Five years later and I'm really grateful to see this answer as I was having a hard time even coming up with the words to describe the problem!
    – Nathaniel Hoyt
    Commented May 1, 2023 at 4:55
  • I change this file, and create the folder Desktop, but the directory Desktop is becoming a symlink always on restart
    – v1d3rm3
    Commented Aug 24, 2023 at 18:18

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