deleting ~/Desktop directory FIXED!

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2012-06-07 at 18:26 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> Well, I could do this quite easily in 11.10, as that is what I have 
> always done. Personal documents are safely kept on another partition 
> just in case something goes boom! and I have to re-install. I leave that 
> partition alone, reformat the entire / partition and re-install.
> Then I re-mount my /opt partition and all of my /home/ric capitalized 
> directories are linked back to there. My home directory is back to it's 
> former glory. ~/Music ~/Videos ~/Documents all were deleted and 
> re-linked with a glitch. Only ~/Desktop refused my "treatment" and this 
> happens only in 12.04

Well of course you can do it however you want.  But this is an extremely
unusual--and IMO overly complex--method.  I don't think it's unrealistic
to assume that the Ubuntu system wouldn't cater to that particular use
case, as it requires deeper knowledge and manual set-up.

Is there a reason why you don't just handle this the same way I, and
every other system installer I've ever met, does it, and make /home a
separate partition altogether from /?

On most modern Linux systems you can easily get away with 30-50G, only,
for root (/).  My current desktop has been upgraded (not reinstalled)
since Ubuntu 7.10 (that's 4+ years of continuous usage without cleaning)
and my root partition is using just 25G right now.  A fresh install is
<10G IIRC.

Then make the entire rest of your disk (after swap) the /home partition.
If you do a custom installation you'll see that there's even a
predefined mount point for /home.

Now if you want to reinstall you simply reformat root (/) without
touching /home and your entire user account is still there, untouched,
and you didn't have to create any symlinks to /opt or do any other
unusual configurations.