Just a quickie. You want to know which file holds your GNOME2 desktop icon layout, sizes, emblems, and so on?
Look no further than $HOME/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home*
I assume Mate (being a fork of Gnome2) has somewhere similar. GNOME3? No idea.
Given that both Gnome2 and Gnome3 utilize GIO to store and access metadata it follows logically that Gnome3 stores it in the same place and Gnome2 – I cannot however find any documentation to confirm or deny this.
indeed, but my level of caring about gnome3 long ago approached zero
I just upgraded from Suse 11 to Suse 12 which has it by default for Gnome users, haven’t decided whether it’s staying yet.