You're not giving enough information about your setup. Any modern desktop has some sort of "session manager" that will auto-start applications based on what's in /etc/xdg/autostart/ (or based on systemd's user session). And xdg-users-dirs is making use of that feature.

What desktop are you using and does it provide the required session manager ? If not, you will have to find a way to run xdg-user-dirs-update when the user starts his graphical session.

Apologies on the lack of information. The whole setup can be seen from https://gitlab.com/Arszilla/kali-i3-gaps

I could place exec --no--startup-id xdg-user-dirs-update on i3's config; where it'll run the command everytime the i3 session is initalized. Sadly, that isn't a viable solution since that command will be ran everytime when the user logs in.

According to my neofetch results, the DE is lightdm-xsession, so maybe something could be done on that part? Because this issue happened with all the custom ISO's I've built using live-build-config's repo; so it persists on Kali's own repos, not only on my project.

I've also tried placing a premade user-dirs.dirs and user-dirs.locale in .config of $HOME via /etc/skel Sadly, it didn't work.

Sadly, that isn't a viable solution since that command will be ran everytime when the user logs in.

Why? This is exactly how this was designed to work.

Because this issue happened with all the custom ISO's I've built using live-build-config's repo; so it persists on Kali's own repos, not only on my project.

Not sure what you mean. The default XFCE live ISO works fine, the directories are created and the configuration file is put into place by xdg-user-dirs-update. See attached picture.

According to my neofetch results, the DE is lightdm-xsession, so maybe something could be done on that part?

That session runs nothing special so your only choice is to play with /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ to add a snippet to run xdg-user-dirs-update.

he default XFCE live ISO works fine, the directories are created and the configuration file is put into place by xdg-user-dirs-update. See attached picture.

Just created a XFCE ISO again, using Kali's live-build-script instead of mine. Still no user folders. Not sure what's the cause at this point. I've attached a picture of post installation on VM. Clean, no customizations done what-so-ever.

I meant that this issue happens on both

• https://gitlab.com/Arszilla/kali-i3-gaps
• https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/build-scripts/live-build-config

This was fixed in a later update. This issue has been since resolved.

Per Arszilla's comment, this issue is resolved by an update