I had a strange issue today and I was wondering what could have caused it.
I left my computer on in desktop mode when I left for work, I was using Heroic to download my cloud saves for a game and as it was taking too long, I just turned off the display and left it on.
When I got home, I turned on the display and and closed Heroic. When I tried to click Return to Game mode icon on my desktop, it told me the file doesn't exist. Strange I thought and first tried to restart the system. After restart the desktop was populated by my Home directory folders and files. At this point I did something stupid and thought they were only links to the actual folders and deleted at least the Documents and Downloads folders (I might have deleted the desktop folder too) before I realized what I was doing. I then restored the folders by trying to access them on the side panel in Dolphin and creating them when prompted. First I checked the settings by clicking the desktop with the right mouse button, going to Desktop and Wallpaper and then Location. It was correctly set at Desktop but still showed the Home folder content on Desktop.
I then accessed the user-dirs.dirs configuration file through Terminal and sure enough, the paths of the deleted folders and desktop were pointing to Home only. After defining the correct path and restoring the Game Mode return icon through terminal I believe I have restored everything to where it should be, apart from the few files I had in my old Downloads folder.
After this I also encountered a bug for the first time where when returning to Game mode my customizations from Decky were completely missing. Restart restored this.
I'm just wondering what could be the cause of this and is there anything more I should do to verify everything is in order.