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fraid I generated a tl;dr for this rather verbose article:
“Home directories are a mess because too many apps ignore XDG spec and dump dotfiles everywhere. The problem isn’t just legacy software—new apps do it too, often out of ignorance or laziness. Windows has similar issues with profile folders. Fixing it requires devs to actually follow standards, but many resist due to inertia or ‘my way is better’ thinking. Users should push back and demand proper XDG compliance to keep $HOME clean.”
my favorite bit is how hostile some are after all this time about xdg beyond a simple WONTFIX https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory#Hardcoded
yes please. its a big peeve for me and thats not even exclusive to linux.
its dumb to be so contrarian about something like where the directory will go. be predictable for us and just respect the fucking standard, it will make everyones lives that little bit easier in the long run. mobile oses simply just force them to write in a specific directory, maybe its necessary here too.
I hate all the cruft in my home directory, but I also hate when stuff suddently stop working after an update, or when all the documentation online talks about something that doesn’t work on my system or is not there anymore. Developers are the ones that will have to deal with people with these issues, so I can see why they are reluctant to implement the naive solutions that some ask for.
We could do this already with flatpak apps
Yeah, flatpaks that just write into $HOME/.var are a prime example of how not to do it.
