If you’ve read my other posts, I have spent days getting all home folders/files off my internal dual boot Linux drive and have finally created all symlinks from that drive to the home folder for each OS.
Kubuntu uses Dolphin and LM uses Nemo. Dolphin was neat in that when you copy a file/folder to Kubuntu, you get asked if you want to create a link. Nemo did not have that, but I have gotten pretty used to its nuances.
Now I am about to toss Nemo, and maybe use Dolphin in LM as I am pulling my hair out trying to figure out that dern sidebar and where it gets its folders, etc.
First, LM and all symlinks were created and all worked. Booted into Kubuntu and there was an upgrade awaiting. So I did…right after using gparted to clone that partition just in case.
I created symlinks and rebooted into LM. Now my desktop looks like somebody tossed the folders full of files all over it
So i look in Nemo and lo and behold in the left pane, Home has a “house icon” but NOW so does Desktop. Clicking that Desktop from the left pane takes me to my “home” folder. Why?
The home folder contains the symlink to Desktop on the external drive, but now so does Desktop. Is that why all this stuff showed up on my desktop?
I have found no way to delete or edit those folders on the left panel. I know how to add now, but not remove.
So I just want to be sure before I go deleting all these items on my actual viewed desktop that I will not be deleting them from my only location on the external drive.
Surely there is an easier way of handling files (GUI) besides this mess in Nemo.
I’ve seen similar happen in Nautilus on Ubuntu with gnome… Can’t remember the fix - but it had something to do with dot files in .local or .config…
Sorry can’t be much more help. Hasn’t happened to me for maybe 4+ years or something…
Just googled it - in Nautilus it’s :
~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
I’ve no idea what Nemo does, or uses… I’m tempted to start using Nemo, 'cause I SORELY miss slow double click to rename files like I can do on MacOS or even explorer in Windows (which bright spark from the Gnome team thought it was a good idea to remove this functionality? I remember in one iteration you were able to enable it again, but then they even took away the option to enable it!) - but it’s not a big issue - honestly - I do about 95% of my file management in the shell in a terminal…
@daniel.m.tripp well sheesh. There is a file by that name in .config, but not sure how or if to edit this one:
# 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/"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/"
Why do I have caja folder? In it is “desktop-metdata” but looks like icons, positions, timestamp data, etc. Not the thing causing Nemo to make Desktop a home folder.
Hopefully somebody knows. I’d gladly deal with this in terminal but I do not know how to find the settings for this so would not have a clue how rectify it there either.
I dont understand.
Are you saying Desktop contains a symlink to itself?
That would cause some considerable confusion.
Before you start blaming Nemo, make sure you have the symlink situation correct.
You have to be careful with symlinks… if you try to make one and it fails, it can leave a messy situation.
But the Desktop with home icon in the left panel does not do anything (I just figured out by watching movement of the highlighter on the left panel). If I click home, I see correct folders/files/links. If highlight Desktop below Home, it moves up one slot to Home itself.
So I guess that shortcut in left panel is dead, but I do not understand why I opened up LM and had a desktop like this:
Yes it does.
I dont have Nemo.
OK I am happy now, your symlinks are correct.
I see, all those icons for files and folders on your background screen?
Where are those files and folders in your filesystem? Is it perhaps thinking some other folder is Desktop? or are there 2 Desktops? Is Nemo somehow remembering old folders now deleted?
Lol…you and I both are happy that it is NOT symlink issues. I tried looking in the nemo folders in apt, .config, etc. but did not see anything that would tell me if it has old settings.
I guess I will uninstall/reinstall and see if it does the same thing or generates things correctly. I will also try searching for one of those items that do not belong on the desktop and see what I find.
@nevj it appears that everything now on my desktop is all of my home folder without the .dot folders. If they show that they are a link, and you follow to source, it is on the external drive where I created the link. But folders without a link are the ones I left in my home folder on the internal drive with LM (i.e., Warpinator, Public, whatever those are for) and the text docs are also left in the internal /home folder as I was afraid to move items like barrier.service, etc. So to me that seems to be some setting that displays /home on my desktop; although I right-clicked the desktop and looked at all settings and did not see one that would do that and I certainly would not want that.
Desktop appearance may be unrelated to the fact that Nemo has a dead link to desktop in the side panel. Just seems too much to be a coincidence that they are not related.
I realised I had nemo installed on Pop! - but I’m mostly using the default “Files” app Nautilus, from Gnome…
Anyway - my left “sidebar” looks almost exactly like it does in Nautilus (i.e the "favourites or booksmarks it’s showing were set in Nautilus) : Nemo sidebar :
so - both seem to read something from some .dot file somewhere, it’s not ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file
# 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/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"
Note also - many of those are symlinks, e.g. “$HOME/Documents” is a symlink to ~/ResilioSync/bigshit/Documents, and “$HOME/Music” is a symlink to ~/ResilioSync/Music, same with Pictures (link to ~/ResilioSync/bigshit/Photos).
I don’t use $HOME/Desktop - it’s always empty - I detest desktop icons… but somethings seem to slip through the cracks, even when I use Gnome Tweaks to explicitly disable desktop icons!
That is where it is controlled in Xfce, but I dont fully understand it.
I can certainly get rid of all icons by setting the first entry (Icon Type) to None.
I, too, detest desktop icons. That is why before all these changes, I had only the newly created scripts I had written to open this site as an app in Midori and my accounting program (which is browser-based) since I could not figure out how to pin that script to the panel. Otherwise, anything else can be found in Nemo, no need for it on my desktop (hate clutter…lol).
And since you previously told me about the .config, etc., I have looked everywhere I can think of to find some file I could edit to remove all this stuff.
In LM Desktop settings, I even have “/home” turned off:
But as you can see, the dekstop layout is showing icons. So I switched that to No Desktop Icons, and it all disappeared. It is just strange to me that I did not make any changes to these settings yesterday.
Is there some type of log I can look at for settings changes yesterday? Remember, it happened after I booted into Clonezilla to image the Kubuntu partition, upgraded Kubuntu from 23.04 to 23.10 then booted back into LM. So if I could look at some log entries with those timestamps, maybe I could see something there that would indicate why the desktop icon in Nemo suddenly has a “home” icon.
I do not think settings changes are logged.
That is one of the problems of GUI for system work… there is no record. At the CLI you can always script things., and there is .bash_history.
Well I have looked in every type of config and setting file and even in elevated privileges cannot remove the desktop with home icon (which is empty) from the sidebar. But I found the issue on: Github
No support is available for removing the home or desktop directories from the sidebar locations.
gsettings set org.nemo.preferences desktop-is-home-dir true
The configuration has the effect requested, but also the unwanted effect of showing the contents of the home directory on the actual desktop of the workspace.
You can turn off the desktop icons - go to Desktop settings, set the desktop layout to 'no icons'
Note also that you can currently remove any other item from the places sidebar by editing the list in Bookmarks > Edit Bookmarks.... The only item you can't currently remove is the Desktop item.
This is essentially what happened (not sure why) and how I cleared my desktop despite these settings by turning off desktop icons. (I knew I had never had that set as NO ICONS before). And this explains why the desktop directory shows what is in home directory.
AND apparently, even though I use NEMO, all of the gsettings are under Nautilus.
Now I have never used gsettings in CLI. But I tried:
gsettings get org.gnome.nautilus.preferences
Usage:
gsettings [--schemadir SCHEMADIR] get SCHEMA[:PATH] KEY
Get the value of KEY
Arguments:
SCHEMADIR A directory to search for additional schemas
SCHEMA The name of the schema
PATH The path, for relocatable schemas
KEY The key within the schema
But not understanding SCHEMADIR & SCHEMA[:PATH]
If I understand correctly, this is where the settings are that can be modified for the side panel.
Nemo has that in preferences. Left click Edit, go down to Context Menu. Tick the box that says make link, it will then be added to right click menu of your mouse. To solve your dilemma reinstall Nemo, uninstall this version of Nemo, making sure that everything is gone, then reinstall it either via terminal or synaptic. Ignore uninstalling the whole of Nemo, just uninstall libnemo-extension1_5.8.5+victoria, as this extension covers nearly everything Nemo needs. Then reinstall it.
@clatterfordslim as for resolving my issue with Nemo, uninstalling did not help as home icons are still beside Home & Desktop. While I was able to get a desktop folder back in the sidebar via Nautilus, apparently there is not way to remove the desktop with home icon without gsettings and I have read the man pages, but still unsure. I don’t want to mess with anything I don’t understand, so now that I have a desktop folder in the sidebar (which is where my own scripts reside) I will just have to live with it.
Quite apart from what Nemo thinks, it is essential that a users home directory exists. Lots of things are written there (in dot files). It has really become part of the system… not just a place for a user to dump files.
That is why I think it is better to let the system have /home/shiela and keep your personal files somewhere else.
/home was originally supposed to separate users from the system. It has failed at that… the system has crept into it.
Users need to retreat to somewhere else.
