I'm exasperated by apps that hide their configuration files deep within my home directory and I have to use strace to figure out where they are. XDG is mostly useful for people who use unix desktops. It's sort of like a compromise between dotfiles and regedit.exe. Because desktops are huge and complex. If you ask your package manager to install one desktop thing, it installs a hundred things. Non desktop UNIX environments don't have that problem. So I don't think CLI programs like htop shouldn't follow XDG. It's non-standard and not the right tool.