Dotfiles becoming undotted in 64-13.1
 

Recently, a lot of hidden folders in my home directories strated becoming visible, (ie. losing the leading dot) - folders such as 'gtk-2.0', 'google-chrome' and 'textroom' started appearing in my home folder. I though it might be a permissions issue with the . folders, so I deleted the new 'undotted' folders and the old 'dotted' ones. But it seems that every now and then a program triggers something which causes some conf file or another to be written to '~/folder/file' instead of '~/.folder/file'

Anyone have a clue as to what could be causing this?

A Pac-Man is afoot!

All my previously dotted directories are still dotted.
It's a mystery...

Visible where? In Dolphin? The command line?

Perhaps you turned on "Show hidden files" in Dolphin or you have somehow created an alias for ls in bash.

Everywhere. These are newly-created real directories; it's not a case of the hidden ones becoming visible.

Not seeing it here on my system.

LOL

Seriously, though, this is still happening.

Even deleting a file in Dolphin triggers this - it creates a folder called '/home/me/Trash' and then moves the file there, instead of into '/home/me/.local/share/trash'.

I'd tear my hair out if I wasn't still laughing at the quoted joke...

My best guess would be that the $XDG_*_HOME variables are not set, or set to ~
Adding:
export XDG_DATA_HOME=~/.local/share
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config
export XDG_CACHE_HOME=~/.cache

to your /etc/profile, bashrc, zshrc, whateverrc might solve the problem.

MMMmmm... This is a mystery indeed. If you still have folders as disparate as 'gtk-2.0', 'google-chrome' and 'textroom' losing dots, there a likely explanation: someone is renaming them. The dottedness, afaik, is a convention. Individual applications dot their own folders and put them in $HOME because they want to, not because of some system setting. (Check that your $HOME is sane.) It is extremely unlikely that unrelated applications all suddenly bug out in this way, so I suspect a single culprit renaming the files. I've never seen a vanilla GNU/Linux install do anything this weird, and I am actually typing this up on a Slack 13.1 x64 that has no such behavior, so think back to customizations you've made and scripts and bash aliases you've added (edit: or removed) since installation.

You're a genius - for some reason, my .bash_profile contained the following:
I have changed the above to entries to what you suggested, will report back to see what changes as a result :)

UPDATE: Just trashed a file and it went to the expected folder. I'll mark this as solved in a couple of days, when I'm sure nothing else funky is going on.