@yarmo 💯

@yarmo
There use to be some XDG environment variables if I recall correctly…

@joel @yarmo No app has gone as low as #Keybase, which took the liberty of creating “/keybase” (yes, that’s in the ROOT folder), ultimately taking the gold in simultaneously demonstrating the incompetence, arrogance, & exaggerated self-importance of those developers.

@yarmo ~/go

@yarmo It drives me batty that Zotero, which is otherwise such a fantastic program, does this. You can override it, but you've got to get into advanced configs to do it.

I feel like making a side project to call out the pieces of software that do this unrespectful shit.

@yarmo let's not forget stepping into a folder of ~/GNUstep...

@yarmo Honestly, why even do they have access to that directory (or to any other file that doesn't belong to the application, and wasn't explicitly selected by a user), where also all the passwords and hashes and such are stored?

@yarmo ohh ~/snap

@yarmo Too complicated. I just ask for sudo so I can put my data into the root directory :P

@yarmo I thought I was the only one bothered by this.

@yarmo
looking at you, #emacs

@yarmo ~/.but-why-tho

@yarmo Here! Here!

@yarmo OMFG FR FR

@yarmo There's one app that immediately creates a folder in my home directory (with a space in the name) before you even get a chance to look at config options.

I can't trust an app that's designed with such disdain for the user.

@yarmo A lot of linux apps have been behaving very windows-like lately, and honestly I'm just not having it.

@yarmo Appendix: for extra points, dear developers, have a detailed look at https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

@yarmo same for Windows. Put it in %APPDATA% or - if you must - also in %USERPROFILE%/.config

@yarmo touch ~/.grass

@yarmo A site educating developers about this would be really useful. Case in point: I started putting data for our apps under ~/.small-tech.org/app-name/… because I saw quite a few other apps doing similar stuff (placing data/config into hidden folders off of ~) and thought it was a convention when I first started releasing CLI apps. Now I know better. Such a site would have helped.

@yarmo

...I'd like to add one exception: IFF the software asks the user first and asks for a pathname (with a ~/.* default).
*sometimes* I'd like to have thoses things where I see them

@yarmo Same thing for Windows – app developers love to store data everywhere, but uninstaller doesn't delete this data 🤦🏻‍♂️. Eclipse IDE especially pissed me off, because it must be removed manually, and there's no uninstaller 😤.

@yarmo from what I gather you haven't encountered the egregiuos crime that is the "snap" folder yet :D

@yarmo I'm glad it's not just me, this makes me so angry. Though I've kind of given up my crusade against it now... I just counted 47 dotfiles in my home folder that shouldn't be there. FORTY-SEVEN FFS!!! 🤬

@yarmo I like ~/.config/appname . It is also better then ~/.appname/config .

You suggest they all go into /etc and /usr/local/share ?

@yarmo so you want a-a-a-ll applications to respect XDG Base dir specification?! Ain't gonna happen, sorry.

@yarmo My simple solution to this: I have a directory in my $HOME which is my actual home. So: ´/home/fishidwardrobe/fishidwardrobe´ I put all my files in there. Now I don't care what crap turns up in $HOME.

@yarmo 😃

@yarmo Meanwhile at Valve:

"We need to make a subdirectory within ~/Documents for the saved games, right?"

@yarmo xdg-ninja is a great tool to help you fix those pesky applications which use envars to change the location

@yarmo so, may be sometime unification will be done and we'll see lot of folders in only one.

@yarmo I feel like this is part of a larger trend of M$ bullshit patterns getting brought into Linux.

@yarmo same thing on Windows. So many applications that have never heard of %APPDATA%. For their application data.

@yarmo I concur very enthusiastically!!!

@yarmo As long as it's prefixed with a ".", I really don't care much. What's worse is those without in your home, though, especially when there's no option to set that location to something different. THAT sucks.

@yarmo Dear linux desktop apps: stop putting your goddamn cache in .config.

@yarmo admittedly some apps make a visible folder because they think it's advertising. But I still wish that these things weren't hidden. Resetting an app's settings to default ought to look like "open up the Preferences folder in my home directory; drag the file called TroublesomeApp to the rubbish bin" (and similarly for caches &c) and that can't happen if everything is hidden away in invisible techie dot folders.

@yarmo Similar vibes to Windows games saving data in the Documents directory. Ah, yes, these save games are documents, makes perfect sense!

@yarmo Cool, but as you were writing this, a program was `touch ~/garbage` just now. lmao

@yarmo ah so it's not just me who noticed that his home directory is free for all for most of the apps

@yarmo I'm grateful for using Flatpak apps, and generally it doesn't (although there are exceptions)

@yarmo
You may want to check out firejail with the private home parameter

@yarmo while it's bad practice, you also don't want to break everyones installations with that change. So You'll need fallback logic and at least test if the home folder has something in the old path.

@yarmo PT: yeahhhhhhhh, leave the home alone. And don't .hide yourself. You are not .git