I accidentally deleted ~/Desktop. This directory plays some kind of important role because now that it is gone all of the folders under ~/ are showing up on my accounts desktop. How do I fix this?

2 Answers

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to go to a terminal and type:

mkdir ~/Desktop

and then press F5 on the desktop to refresh it.

First you should create the directory again:

mkdir ~/Desktop

Now if the default icon has not appear then you should edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file.

gedit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

It should be same as this:

# 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="$HOME/"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

Take a look over this for more information

NB: you may need to have a restart or logout and then login to apply the new settings

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