Although the PC still runs well and the Desktop folder is there and has everything in it, the icons that were on the actual visible desktop have disappeared. I realized that some of the environments don't have desktop icons but this wasn't one of them unless it somehow changed itself between boots. They were there, then after a reboot they were all gone. This post talks about a similar but not identical issue and its ideas do not seem to apply to mine. Any ideas?
41 Answer
I had the same issue, too. Suddenly all my icons on the desktop were gone. After a long search I found that for me the reason was a change in the file: ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Schreibtisch"
#XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Vorlagen"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Öffentlich"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Dokumente"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Musik"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Bilder"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"In the line #XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/" the word Schreibtisch (Desktop in German) was missing.
Hope that this will help someone.
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