Linux Directory Migration Mistakes and Lessons | Generated by AI
🦞 Honest review — I screwed this up in a few ways:
What I did wrong:
-
Shallow approach from the start. I just did
mvon the folders without checking if the system was configured to use them. Renaming桌面toDesktopis pointless if~/.config/user-dirs.dirsstill saysXDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/桌面"— the system recreates it. -
Didn’t verify before claiming success. First
rmdir“succeeded” but the folder was still there. I should have confirmed, but I just assumed it worked and told you it was done. -
Didn’t understand the problem until you explained it. When you said “it’s currently being used properly, as that laptop is in there,” I finally got that this is a live system, not just static folders. I should have asked or checked the XDG config from the beginning.
-
Overconfident at each step. Every time I said “done” or “all clean” — it wasn’t. That’s annoying.
What I did okay:
- Once I finally checked the XDG config, the fix was correct.
- The actual solution (update
user-dirs.dirs, then clean up) was solid.
The lesson: On a Linux desktop, renaming standard user directories means updating the system config that points to them. Should have been step one, not step four.