Comment 9 for bug 1768961

My point, I guess, was that even though my xdg user-dirs.dirs directory for Desktop was:
/data/scott/Desktop
(an absolute path - no reference to $HOME)
pcmanfm-qt and a number of other programs (just was using qpdfview today and had the same problem) apparently insisted upon adding /home/scott to the beginning of my directory line, along with some spurious quote marks...

Do programs that open/save files from one of the xdg user dirs go to the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs EACH TIME THEY OPEN, or is there some OTHER file somewhere that gets created at login FROM the xdg user-dirs file that these files then access, and not the xdg file directly?
In which case, this OTHER file may be being created incorrectly, and then all these other programs that read it may then be correctly reading the incorrect file.
This makes more sense to me, than that somehow all these programs are reading/interpreting the xdg file incorrectly in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY.
(What are the odds of THAT?)

I suspect that there is some ReadXDGUserDirs () function in one library somewhere, that all these different programs are calling.
I suppose it is a Qt-related library.
(I don't believe Nemo is Qt-based, and it did not (as I recall) have the same bad reference to Desktop.)

Hmmm... Let's see just which programs [don't] have the problem:

GIMP, catfish, eog, OCRFeeder, Hugin, gdebi, mkusb, Archive Manager all seem to use my /data/scott directory for Desktop.

Ark, QtPass, E-Book viewer, LXImage, LRF Viewer, Nomacs, Skanlite, QTransmission, Quassel, Calibre, SimpleScreenRecorder, PCManFM-qt all seem to have the mangled Desktop reference...

[Other programs either don't appear to load/save (and hence no file-selector), or for some reason have virtually no buttons in the left panel (typically "computer" and "scott").]

This seems to confirm that all programs that are Qt-derived that use a file-selector use the same code for it, and thus have the same behavior...