For years, the introduction of certain compulsory directories on a kubuntu install has annoyed me to no end. You can’t simply remove them, as they’re recreated. I’ve never had enough time or inclination to discover how to remove them, because they’re easy to ignore and harmless.
The directories are introduced by a package called xdg-user-dirs. As kubuntu uses some of the package functionality for autostart and such, the easiest fix is to edit /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf and disables the directories. Now, they can be removed. Silly.
Actually, that ends up being a poor approach. It hosed KDE 3.5.9 which seemed to think my desktop path was actually /. A better approach seems to be to edit .config/user-dirs.dirs and set all the paths to $HOME instead.
Ugh.
