I have never ever had any use of directories mentioned in the title, so how can I get rid of them? I really don’t feel like I have a Desktop on my phone, or use Templates, or have anything Public I’d like to share here. And Playlists are handled by Unplayer. Yet here the directories are in my $HOME and taking space in my dialogs and cramping my Tab-completion. Does anyone use these directories, and how?
Another approach would be to rename them via localization strings I guess?
Also, ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs seems to be almost completely ignored now — the new directories are made, but that’s pretty much it. Browser does try; it shows altered Download directory set via XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR, but fails to write anything there.
The XDG used to work at some point, at least I remember renaming Downloads at some point. The new directories are still generated, but they are not honored. There seems to be another mechanism at play that overrides the XDG-stuff. My guess is that it’s related to Sailjail, but I haven’t dug deeper.
Strange, on normal Linux they are created at user created according to /etc/skel/ not sure about what creates them at every boot but XDG is a suspect and I would also look at systemd-homed and the like.
If it were difficult to get rid of these directories, could you just use them to store whatever one may see fit or is there a risk that whatever keeps recreating them might also edit or delete data?
I don’t think there is a danger of losing data, the directories are just made if they are not found. And yes, I could just use them, but I tend to name directories by the content…
A possible solution using my spare phone with SFOS 5.0.0.68. Tread carefully if you want to follow along, the following has “it seems to work, but might not” -license. And obviously this is not optimal since things will most likely will be reverted back to default on any updates…
(What really irks me, that there seems to be $XDG_-variables in play, and those directories are also made if you fiddle around with ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs, but they are completely ignored by sailjail. So what is the point?)
So anyway, under /etc/sailjail/permissions/ are a bunch of files. For example for changing Playlists you’d have to edit Base.permissions and Music.permissions. Grep around and you’ll know what to edit. Tail of my Base.permissions looks like this now:
All the crap directories are still there, but now hidden. And Downloads I renamed as incoming. My eyes are now at rest and my Tab-key will live a little longer
Just a folder to store links and .desktop files but got superseded by menus and launches a long time ago in my workflow - mostly Krunner. The Problem with the Desktop directory is that it only makes sense if it’s shown as a background or can be quickly presented in an other way.
You all got it right, /etc/skel is used upon user creation. Sandboxing must match to default xdg folders so that data won’t get lost upon app exit. Randomly created folders under $HOME are lost upon app exit.
Hope this helps to understand. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel again.
I’m thinking this problem would go away, if variables from ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs would be read back to sailjail. The point of that file is to override what ever directories are set in the system level with the values that the user wants (https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs/).
But I also realize that this is not a top priority.
