I have huge amounts of cache files in both .cache and .config. It's supposed to make my life easier by being able to backup .config and dump everything. but in reality this doesnt happen.

Backing up .config for just the user defined configs is a massive PITA. you have to put so many gitignore exceptions and I'm not even talking about the gigs of data all the chromium derivatives put into that folder.

Yeah but chrome devs half-assing the trivial xdg spec doesn't mean that xdg sucks - its just not implemented properly.

Browsers tend to work fine. Some apps just fail badly like rofi (command history stored there oof)

For what it's worth I also tmpfs+asd .nvm, .npm, and */node_modules, without any major headaches. I did have to fix a couple minor pathing dramas but nothing too drastic.

It also has an option to ignore entries listed in your .gitignore.

Here you are referring to separating the config and data? Is this actually a problem? I can see how for things like games it would be valuable to have a special location for thing like saves games, like how you can move the roaming save for minecraft from a computer to another; but I never understood the net gain from splitting the application files in config/data

Other "new" softwares that fail to follow best-practices by putting top level files into ~/ just on my laptop are: npm, Ansible, pylint, docker, steam, rustup+cargo, vscode, IDEA IDE, Zoom, AWS CLI. These applications have no excuse.

Also I agree on the Documents, Music, Video, etc. I hate upper case letters in my folders, so when I do a reinstall I delete those and restore my backups from the lower-case versions.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs/

The Arch wiki has more instructional docs:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_user_directories

I just looked at my Win10 profile dir, and it has 36 dot-prefixed folders, and 7 more files on top level. Offenders include .gitconfig, .rustup, and .vscode, just to name a few.

15 year Mac user (re)exploring Windows due to bad hardware...

https://www.farmanager.com/screenshots.php?l=en

Nevertheless there are alternatives. One liked by many are Norton Commander alike file managers like Total Commander or even Far. I am not too much in favor of them though.

I like to use Directory Opus. It is powerful and flexible. Costs money though.

https://www.gpsoft.com.au/

Much better than storing them in C:\Windows or C:\Program Files, as was the case a decade ago, before windows introduced UAC and blocked write access to these.

All this kind of stuff is what Appdata\Roaming and Appdata\Local are supposed to be for.

Users often need to back them up. Backup systems often include Documents by default but not AppData.

Files in AppData are hidden, and you would not expect users to find them.

Further, many save games can be opened with a text editor just fine :)

My witcher saves were 10GB, until I realize that problem and deleted them, no wounder backups were slow. Skyrim is not that far off.

Pretty sure backup is already integrated in steam for these two games.

In the witcher 1 there is also an uncompressed BMP thumbnail with each save that is about a megabyte. It's PNG compressed in the witcher 2. They learned from their mistake.

Chrome's cache is in AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data and Firefox's cache is in AppData/Local/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/. The only big offender on my system is npm with a cache in AppData/Roaming/npm-cache

Finding the directory requires new APIs introduced in Vista and Server 2008. See SHGetKnownFolderPath

I just tried to use the API. I literally couldn't find a working example on the internet in 2 hours so I guess noone figured it out in a decade.

Wrote https://stackoverflow.com/a/54499257/5994461

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/version...

I'm surprised that these new IsWindows...() functions claim compatibility down to Windows 2000. Doubt microsoft knew how they would name their next release 20 years ago. A Google search indicates that they are in fact broken.

If IsWindows... doesn't work then you can use the VerifyVersionInfo function directly.

I don't even get what you want to say.

The user folder exists for a reason. Drop your crap in there.

But just dropping stuff in my home directory--look, if I'm in a hurry and my defenses are down, you basically just encouraged me to clutter things up.

The last software I found that does this is a "download helper"...even though I have a Downloads folder that my distro already set up, that Chrome and Firefox know to use, this download helper thinks I want those downloads dumped in my home folder. I hope some generous person changes this behavior, meanwhile I forgot to charge it manually for the last batch and I have a bunch of cleanup to do.

/home/user/Documents/

/home/user/Downloads/

/home/user/Pictures/

/home/user/Videos/

Let me know what I'm missing.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_user_directories

It looks like maybe the "official" documentation is here:

http://user-dirs.freedesktop.org/releases/xdg-user-dirs-0.17...

But I haven't gone through that carefully.

I strongly prefer apps default to the previously used directory, and the home directory otherwise. IME apps are wrong 99% of the time when they guess their own save location.

If it’s hard to change, you should’ve either fixed your architecture from the start, or thought a bit harder about the implications of magically creating a new directory in $HOME.

If you do deeply nested paths (as npm used to do) then you can run against the old MAX_PATH limit that limits paths to 260 characters, but the correct solution is to either choose a flatter directory structure or use the newer APIs that allow paths with 32,767 characters.

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local

Or even better to work with localization

%LOCALAPPDATA%

Steam should have worked to figure out a better approach to UAC years ago. At this point it is one of several big tech debt issues with Steam that has my confidence in Valve at an all time low as a consumer.

I also have C:\CMD for my own batch files.

Every single program should be fully contained in its own directory including all the settings,logging,configuration etc...

No touching of any common resource or repository.

It should be enough to delete single tree to fully uninstall program with all the garbage it created along the way

\Programs\VendorX\ProgramY\code

But it seems because of the idea that some people may want to back up data and config separately, we end up with stuff scattered everywhere, with some even hidden away in the Windows Registry. Makes backups ridiculously complex.

That said, for something like source code, it makes sense to go into $HOME, so I don't understand this particular complaint the other poster made.

It's weird that the Go developers were working in such isolation that they didn't pick up on this. All programming languages that I know of that work on modern tooling (Haskell, Rust, Node.JS, even C#!) adopted the Ruby style dependency management when it turned out to be correct years ago.

I can't remember the last time I had a version management problem in Ruby, though the ecosystem is so stable right now not many backwards incompatible things happen any more.

From my impression the answer was more "we set up things in a hurry because of deadlines and now we are stuck with this until we implement the epoch system"

    mkdir ~/real_home

Ew.

Yuuuup. It baffles me how Linux users can simultaneously complain that 'its never the year of the Linux desktop' and then at the same time rile against basic usability tenets. The average users wants/needs Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc folders, and it wants the OS to be aware and use these as such. Now I'm okay with being able to set a specific flag that doesn't make these folders during install, but by default they absolutely should be there, unless you're doing a server install.

And I guess I would call it a "basic usability tenet" that the computer does what I tell it to. Documents, Music, and Videos folders violate this, because if I do the seemingly-obvious thing of just deleting them, the applications that want to use them will just recreate them unless I edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. So, if developers really think they need to 'help' their 'average users' by creating these folders by default, they should finish the job and honor my desire to not use them, which I've expressed by deleting the damn things.

Also, if I want to rename them, the system should honor that. E.g. if I rename "Music" to "music", applications should not then go and re-create a "Music" folder.

Or, you know, they could just simplify my life and theirs by not creating these 'special' folders in the first place.

At this point, Guix and Nix seem the most promising for cross-distro packages.

I don't know how I did this.

I actually tried the Snap thing too, I don't remember how it went but I would say it was bad. I think I couldn't find a way to search for packages from the CLI.

If every desktop application that needed to store cross-invocation state asked for permission we'd probably say it was an invasion of bad-design huns.

You're complaining on a really high level and nobody suggested "this is fine". They suggested "wishlist" is fine according to their definition of "if it's not immediately broken and a fix is not trivial"

If you have an issue with default folders that are quite normal in a modern desktop environment I suggest you move back to Arch or wherever you came from and install i3 again?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053...

Also, the bug was first reported in 2016, and Mark Shuttleworth himself has commented on it. And yet it's still not fixed. That gives me the impression that the devs don't consider it super-important. Which is odd to me, since I consider not doing this kind of thing to be 'table stakes' for any application that wants me to take it seriously.

> If you have an issue with default folders that are quite normal in a modern desktop environment I suggest you move back to Arch or wherever you came from and install i3 again?

Ummm, I came from Linux before they started having default Documents, Videos, etc folders. And, like I said, the nice thing is that, in Linux, I can change the XDG environment variables and delete the (IMHO) foolish Documents, Music, Videos, etc folders.

I'll drop "/etc/papersize" in return. If you are not familiar with this and do not print to letter paper then you will find it very, very useful.

My life at home is now worth living every time the wife hits print. Such a simple idea - brilliant.