[SOLVED] messed up bad, cinnamon thinks my /home folder is my desktop folder

[tpo100ckid]

i will now describe how i got into this mess and beg for help

1. accidentally move most of my home folder into /home/.zoom because i was trying to change folder icons
2. cinnamon now thinks my desktop folder is in /home/.zoom
3. try to move it to /home, it won't work
4. try to move it again with elevated permissions, it won't work
5. try to delete /home/.zoom, it won't work
6. log out and back into cinnamon, now my desktop folder is set to /home

this isn't permanent because i can just make a new profile and move my stuff there, but i want to know if i my current profile is still fixable or if it's just borked forever

[tpo100ckid]

mwant to say "messed" not "rainbow", not sure how that happened. oops

[Jat]

mwant to say "messed" not "rainbow", not sure how that happened. oops

You should be able to edit the title.

[Moonstone Man]

mwant to say "messed" not "rainbow", not sure how that happened. oops

"messed" was probably what you intended but you must've used a naughty word, which was changed by the BB system to a non-naughty word. Look on the bright side, the moderators will be keeping an eye on you now.

[tpo100ckid]

i'm going to ask again if there's any way to fix this because i feel a sense of dread just having this here, sorry if annoying
edit: nevermind! i think i found the solution through some difficult duckduckgo searching, to edit $HOME/.config/user-dirs.dirs
i've restarted cinnamon and it hasn't worked, but i suspect it'll start working again after i log out and back in but i'm busy to do that right now

[Moem]

Have you tried restoring from a Timeshift snapshot?

[tpo100ckid]

Have you tried restoring from a Timeshift snapshot?

i'm hesitant on restoring a snapshot due to, well, personal files and 8 gigabytes worth of steam games installations

[rene]

Timeshift by default does not do home directories anyway. The word "most" and the permission issues from your problem description are fairly unfortunate as to grokking what you in fact did, but sure, it'll not in a general sense be a problem to get things moved back unless you deleted things outright. Begin with, after possibly sudo apt-get install rsync and if e.g. /home/.zoom/Desktop is where your old Desktop folder is now at,

Code: Select all

sudo rsync -av --chown=$(whoami):$(whoami) /home/.zoom/ ~/

This may already fix most or all and you'll want to delete /home/.zoom after you have things settled again --- but let's go one step at a time, as said due to not knowing what you did in detail originally. Certainly log out and back in after rsync. And by the way be careful to get e.g. the trailing slashes in that command exactly as posted.

[tpo100ckid]

i found out how to fix it w/o external tools, it's not too hard, so nevermind
go to ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs, and fix everything, then log out and back in
this also fixed my apparently broken pictures folder
well, thanks regardless
i should ask, actually, one more thing: how does one mark a thread as closed or done?

[Moem]

i should ask, actually, one more thing:

My signature will tell you.
Glad you fixed it!