nautilus does not respect desktop_is_home_dir setting

[Alexey Balmashnov]

To reproduce:

* Set /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir to true
* Remove ~/Desktop
* Log-off/Log-on
* Create ~/Desktop
* Set /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir to false

Nautilus still uses ~ as a Desktop folder

Latest Intrepid.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

that's known upstream you can track it here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449624

[Alexey Balmashnov (a.balmashnov)]

It looks like this is an intended behavior (i.e. [d]effective by design).

It seams to be that Log-off/Log-on step is crucial here. Since by default Ubuntu invokes xdg-user-dirs-update, which resets empty folders corresponding to anything set in .config/user_dirs.dirs to $HOME and nautilus respects this setting further on.

[Tom Jennings (tomj-wps)]

metoo

i had been running with desktop_is_home_dir checked (~/ as desktop) decided to switch back to ~/Desktop as desktop. Unable to get it to revert to ~/Desktop by any means.

$ gconf-editor
    apps -> nautilus -> preferences -> unchecked desktop_is_home_dir

control-alt-backspace restart x/logout/login. no change. checked settings. repeated again after

$ rm -r .gconf* .gnome*

repeat the gconf-editor settings thing (still there).

Desktop remains ~/

tomj@zx:~$ ls -la Desktop
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 tomj 4096 2008-12-09 17:32 ./
drwxr-xr-x 102 tomj 12288 2008-12-09 17:43 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 tomj 0 2008-12-09 17:32 foo

WTF, over.

[Tom Jennings (tomj-wps)]

Sorry. Forgot to add, rebooted after

 $ rm -r .gconf* .gnome*

All custom settings lost of course (background, fonts, etc), desktop_is_home_dir still unchecked, but nautilus still shows ~/ as desktop.

Sorry for the 2nd post.

Any workarounds?

[Tom Jennings (tomj-wps)]

OK, the redhat folk found a workaround, that is probably a hint for where the bug lies.

gconf-editor doesn't change config file which is at

 ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

edit that, restart nautilus

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=251301

here's mine:

tomj@zx:~$ cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
# 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/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/download"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/"

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The setting has been removed from nautilus some years ago, closing