Yes and that 10% can cause some unexpected, sometimes hard to fix problems. A poorly written build script or installer that expects a specific distro's directory layout can cause some problems. Especially if it's a large convoluted build system that hard codes the directories in multiple places.
I've actually had to deal with this, it sucks. That was as an end user trying to use an app, not as a developer.
You run into this a lot trying to build small libraries and stuff. There's unfortunately a lot of poor programming habits out there. Directories inevitably sometimes get hardcoded and this causes problems because of the inconsistencies between distros.
>and while you do have a point about user configs, it is getting better. .config and .local are getting used more and more
And yet there's hundreds of apps that will never be updated or changed to conform to standards.
>are an improvement over every app dropping stuff in $HOME.
Tell that to snap. It insists its folder must sit nicely in my home folder and nowhere else.
i suspect many of those are no longer actively maintained. at best they receive security patches from distributions.
Tell that to snap. It insists its folder must sit nicely in my home folder and nowhere else.
my (low) opinion of snap aside, the bad here is that the location is not configurable. as a library of applications, i would want snap in $HOME. or i would put it in $HOME/lib or an equivalent. maybe .local would be appropriate too, but i understand it's for app specific user-data, so it doesn't look like whole apps should be in there. (edit: elsewhere i just read that .local is supposed to be like a user specific /usr/local, so snap should fit in there somewhere)
as a workaround try to use a bind-mount
Are people finally following the XDG standard? [0]
Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro.
there are differences, but it's 90% the same in the major distributions.
and while you do have a point about user configs, it is getting better. .config and .local are getting used more and more and are an improvement over every app dropping stuff in $HOME.