[SOLVED] xfce4: Lost Desktop folder...

andrew.46 · 01-16-2016, 03:51 AM

A long term Fluxbox user I have had a look at xfce on Slackware -current. I suspect because I have no $HOME/Desktop folder (not useful to me under Fluxbox)xfce instead displays the entire contents of $HOME on the Desktop instead. Thunar also does not display the 'Desktop' icon under 'Places' in the side panel.

I have tried recreating the Desktop folder, as well as deleting $HOME/.config/xfce4 with no good result. Also reinstalled xfce. I am missing something obvious here?

KDE displays a normal desktop FWIW...

chemfire · 01-16-2016, 05:50 AM

I can only speculate as I am still on 14.1 everywhere with the prior version of XFCE as well.

The actual file paths for the special folders were always configurable. I hope they still are because I certainly don't want ~ to be my desktop. Anyway the file at least used to be

~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

maybe have a look and see where XDG_DESKTOP_DIR points. Set that to whatever you like make a directory there. Here is the content of my ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file if yours is missing.

Quote:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/.Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Download"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/MyDocuments"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/MyDocuments/audio"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/MyDocuments/Images"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/MyDocuments/Images"

andrew.46 · 01-16-2016, 03:03 PM

Indeed that has set me on the right track and corrected the issue. Thanks