Why does Firefox keep creating a ~/Desktop folder?

Question

This is more of a puzzle than a problem:

Every time I start Firefox, a "Desktop" folder is created in my home folder (home/me/Desktop). I delete it, use Firefox, it comes back.

Am I sure it's Firefox?

I have a basic, default installation (Freya), which has been updated. The only changes I made were to remove Midori and add Firefox. I did some trial-and-error and it only happens (and always happens) after starting Firefox.

I could live with it, I suppose, but the voices in my head are anal-retentive and being all ocd fussy about it. ;-)

Answer 1

You can set your $HOME directory as Desktop in xdg-user-dirs config file (~/.config/user-dirs.dirs).

This can be done manually through text editor. Open this file:

scratch-text-editor ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

And add this line to the end of file:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"

Result:

Answer 2

This is a re-hash of a very good post about this, but I'm including this for other like me who might stumble here and who want to understand a bit more about why this is happening

The reason why Firefox insists on creating these directories is that it follows a freedesktop.org practice attempting to standardise how applications use “well known” directories.

Fortunately, however, this standard also offers a way to prevent Firefox from creating these directories.

Edit the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file so that it has the following contents.

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/"

If ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs does not exist, you can simply create it