I have tried everything under the sun, including user-dirs.dir:

    % cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
    XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME"
    XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME"

Yet still:

    % ls -ld ~/Desktop
    drwxr-xr-x 2 mt mt 4096 Oct 22 18:04 /home/mt/Desktop/

Sometimes there's a ~/Downloads directory too. But not today.

I have no idea what keeps creating these. It's pretty annoying as I have a lot of intentionally short-named things in my ~ for easy shell usage, and it really sticks out.

inotify doesn't support reporting the PID of the process that triggered the event, but it seems fanotify does. Maybe I should set up a watcher for this.