Documents and Desktop folder just went missing

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

Documents and Desktop folder just went missing for no apparent reason. I’m not sure why it happened. Any thoughts?

2

Just a quick confirmation of sorts, can you please share the output of:

ls -a ~/ | grep -E 'Desktop|Documents'
3

If you are on KDE plasma can you please go to System Settings > System > Session > Locations and see what is the value that is given over there for Documents and Desktop.

Also please provide the output of the following command from inside a terminal
inxi -S -xxx --za

If you are not running KDE Plasma 6.x then go to desktop, right click and create a new Directory/Folder. Once that is created, double click on it and see where the location is in the address bar of your File manager.

About why it happened, can be due to two main reasons.

  1. Your drive is becoming old and needs to be replaced.
  2. The directories, “Documents” and “Desktop” were moved by running some command in the terminal or by running some script or by some user action.

There can be other minor reasons too. But that is a post for some other time

4

samsung phone keyboard is t4ash, I’ll explain this image on another device

20260709_221014
20260709_2210144624×2084 1.75 MB

5

I’m on a liveusb to prevent further damage. also, this is a macbook pro 2017 (non touchbar variant)

These may not be of much use since im on a live usb currently?

6

here is the output anyways, although it might be a little outdated from the version I actually use on my laptop, this is what the liveusb says

20260709_221743
20260709_2217434624×2084 1.67 MB

7

oh a thing to note, the desktop seemed to just use the ~ home folder

like it default4d there after it git deleted

8

What’s the output of:
(adjust accordingly to point to your actual home folder, not the Live ISO one)

cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
9

Yep from Live usb they are not much of use.

Please have a look at the post by @Bink.