Ubuntu – How to change default folder names in home directory

Use the following (as root, or with sudo if not root):

mkhomedir_helper username

For this to work, folder /home/username must not exist.

For X-related folders (Desktop, Downloads, etc), you will need to login in a graphics environment; they will be automatically generated the first time you login.

Well, you could just add this line to your ~/.profile¹:

HOME=/user/home/

However, that really isn't a good idea. Problems it would cause include (but are probably not limited to):

1. That will only work if /home/user is owned by your user. If it isn't, you won't even be able to log in.

2. This will work for your user only. For everyone else, your home directory will be whatever is stored in /etc/passwd. This means that, for example, cd ~user will fail. In other words, if I log in as bob and bob has the line HOME=/home/bob/foo in ~/.profile, then bob thinks that his home directory is /home/bob/foo but nobody else knows that:

    $ whoami
    bob
    $ echo $HOME
    /home/bob/foo
    $ cd ## this moves to your $HOME
    $ pwd
    /home/bob/foo
   

So far so good. But:

    $ whoami
    terdon
    $ cd ~bob
    $ pwd
    /home/bob

3. This will drive your sysadmin insane. You do not want to anger your sysadmin for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

In any case, it is rarely a good idea to mess with variables like $HOME, as it can often have unintended consequences. Instead, a much cleaner solution would be to make sure every new shell session starts in the target directory. Just add this line to your ~/.bashrc:

cd /user/home/

Now, each time you log² in or open a terminal, you will find yourself in /user/home.

¹ _{Or ~/.bash_profile if it exists.}

² Log in to Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, anyway. For other distributions/OSs, you might need to add it to ~/.profile as well.See here.