If you’re at all like me, your desktop can become rather cluttered with files over time. One way to at least have files stored in your /home folder rather than your /home/Desktop folder is to set your /home folder as your actual Desktop. This is particularly helpful if you use a separate larger drive as your /home folder.
Update: as Simple Help reader marco pointed out (see Comments section) there’s a much easier way to do this – that also works in modern (2021) versions of Ubuntu.
cd ~
rmdir Desktop
ln -s . ./Desktop
Here’s the old method that doesn’t work in current versions of Ubuntu (but will still work in older versions).
It’s probably worth mentioning that this isn’t actually specific to Ubuntu. You can do this with any *nix distribution that uses Gnome as the desktop manager.
View Comments
an alternative way to do so is, to create a symbolic link 'Desktop' that points to your home directory :
#go to your home directory
cd ~
#remove folder 'Desktop'
rmdir Desktop
#create symbolic link 'Desktop'
ln -s . ./Desktop