Location(s) of files containing desktop settings?

[Ken Moffat]

In November last year I tried (and failed) to get a usable 4.19-rc1
xwayland desktop.  An experimental build, no worries.  That machine
shares /home across multiple builds (current which might be
experimental, last good system, previous good system, maybe others.

I came back to it to look at building a partial newer system to test
TeXLive 2025 pretest.  Before I started, the newest 4.19 system had
my choice of background on workspace 1, but not the others.  The
previous 4.18 systems all had xfce working fine.

Built a new system with (most of) xfce-4.20, got annoyed by the
backgrounds.  Googled for (past) suggestions - some were very old
and mentioned xfce programs I did not have - and in the process
ended up running something which removed the backgrounds and the
right-click menu (so, only menu only on the panel).  Unfortunately,
it seems I did not note *what* I did :-(  I have a second user ID
set up only for building certain packages.  With that ID, running
startxfce4 gave me a normal xfce4 background and the right-click
menu, so I figured things were not too bad.  Finished testing, now I
want to sort the system before the next new system build.  Google
found a suggestion to, as root, run 'xfdesktop&'.

That looked goodish : connection to dbus failed, using defaults, but
I got a right-click menu.  Unfortunately, it soon became clear that
*root* had the right-click menu, so browsers did not work.

Stopped to catch up with pending security updates for the old
systems (e.g. firefox), at some point the old 4.18 systems have
similarly lost their backgrounds and right-click menu.

As a first step I copied all of ~/.config/xfce4 from a different
machine and used that to replace what I had, but no change.

I hope to examine the dbus issue in a fresh build (maybe on a faster
machine where I have not banjaxed my xfce sessions), but I'd really
like to understand what else I need to do to restore the desktop
settings (e.g. on existing xfce-4.18 systems) in case my new build
breaks those as well.

Pretty please with sugar / sweetener of your choice ?

ĸen
-- 
     Chimera: It have thee legges of an mermade, the hair of an
     tortoise, the teeth of an fowel, and the winges of an snake.
             (A footnote in 'Sourcery' by Sir Pterry).