I installed Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with the Chinese language option. My home folder was automatically created with Chinese‑named subfolders, such as “桌面” (Desktop), “文档” (Documents), “下载” (Downloads), etc. They appear correctly in the file manager, but everywhere else — terminal, scripts, English‑language applications — I can only reach them using the Chinese paths. This is extremely inconvenient.
My core request:
Keep the Chinese names visible in the file manager as display labels only, while also making these folders accessible through their standard English names (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, …). Both names should point to the exact same location without any conflict.
Current behavior vs. desired behavior:
- File manager: Currently shows Chinese names → Should continue to show Chinese names exactly as before.
- Terminal: Now only
cd 文档 works; cd Documents fails → cd Documents should also open the “文档” folder.
- English applications: Often do not recognize the Chinese names and create separate English folders, splitting my files → Saving to
Downloads should place files directly into my “下载” folder.
What I hope from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS:
When the system is installed in Chinese, make this the default: Chinese serves only as the display label, and both English and Chinese paths work normally.
I do not think that your criticism is limited to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The same results would show in every version of Ubuntu.
I would see the same problem if I spelt Downloads without the first letter being capitalized.
What you hope for should apply to installs in every language. Do you not think so? If you get what you want with Chinese then someone else should get what they want with an install in, say, Arabic, Or, Russian. Any language that does not use the Latin alphabet.
I consider what you hope for to be impossible. I cannot give you the technical reasons why it is impossible. I guess it is not a trivial thing to do (software engineer’s speak for “not a hope!” It would cost a lot of money to pay a team of software engineers to write the code. Even if there is code that could give you want you hope for. And everyone else the same.
I will go further and say, it would be science fiction with subtitles.
Creating an alias does not bypass the problem?
Trying to apply this to every language on every Linux distribution would be impossible, literally, even if you were to restrict this only to Bash.
A far easier solution would be to create symbolic links. Here is how you’d do it in the terminal.
ln --symbolic ~/桌面 ~/Desktop
ln --symbolic ~/文档 ~/Documents
ln --symbolic ~/下载 ~/Downloads
You can abbreviate --symbolic to -s. You need do this process only once.
Files Menu –> Preferences –> Optional Context Menu Actions –> Turn on switch “Create Link” . Then right-click on the folder and choose create link
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