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Firefox has an issue that’s been open for 20 years regarding implementing the XDG Base Directory Specification.
Firefox is the biggest offender for me. ~/.mozilla instead of something sane like ~/.config/firefox
Even worse, Thunderbird doesn’t save data in ~/.mozilla/thunderbird, but in ~/.thunderbird.
my favourite part is Steam throwing in a symlink, a broken symlink, and a directory of 4 files and 7 more symlinks that all point to a more reasonable point in
~/.local/share/steam/Which indirectly led to this wild as fuck bug that nuked some poor user’s data.
Haha you just reminded me of that damn flashing broken steam sym link in my home folder, it’s been there for years and I’ve yet to investigate or do anything about it.
It’s there for ancient compatibility reasons and recreated when steam starts, iirc. I’ve looked a bit into removing it last year but didn’t get far
lol that’s great. Does flatpak Steam do that too? I can’t see anything from Steam directly in my home directory, and I use the flatpak version.
Flatpak itself violates the xdg base dir spec by making ~/.var
It’s one thing when they have legacy hardcode mountains preventing a standardisation, but I really dislike developers who just disagree with the standard and take away the choice as well and justify it with some made up problems with that standard.
https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/864
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735285
etc…
Archlinux Wiki even has an article about those.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory#Hardcoded
who would win?
dozens of conflicting standards on where to store files over years of poorly enforced linux development practice
vs
some symlink bois
for real tho, I discovered gnu-stow the other day and it looks like the ideal solution for this sorta stuff
If plasma could put all their damn files inside a “plasma” folder that’d be great too.
Haven’t used much of Linux before, can someone explain the joke?
The Windows equivilent would be instead of putting application data in the AppData folder, it throws it in Documents, My Games, or just in the home folder directly.
ah so like every fucking game and it’s save files for some reason?
Better, it could be literally anywhere and there’s nothing you can do about it. Also symlinks practically look like regular folders and files to most apps.
I haven’t run into a game that does this 🤷♂️
There’s no game related dirs in your My Documents dir? Most don’t even use My Games they just dump directly into My Documents. I guarantee most game devs don’t understand the difference between local and roaming either. They just put shit randomly wherever they want
Oh, on Windows, sure. Not on Linux though.
Linux is just as bad. You actually got anything in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or is your /home just a dot file dumping ground?
lol, this almost reads as a personal attack.
I have almost nothing in my home directory, no. Been applying this to clean it up even further. I want my chezmoi dotfiles repo to be clean. Especially not games’ files since I run Steam through flatpak. It does put things in ~/.var but at least it’s collected to one point.
Not really a problem of “Linux” or “Windows”, but more of “developers”.
Set your config directory to be your home directory and outplay those apps
Protect your home, use xdg ninja
I love you all very much but just please be aware that “the floor” is literally where the files are supposed to go, according to the spec. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, nobody likes it. But that’s why it’s happening.
Relevant section quoted for the lazy:
User specific configuration files for applications are stored in the user’s home directory in a file that starts with the ‘.’ character (a “dot file”). If an application needs to create more than one dot file then they should be placed in a subdirectory with a name starting with a ‘.’ character, (a “dot directory”). In this case the configuration files should not start with the ‘.’ character.
You know everything on that site was written in 2004 or earlier, right? That hasn’t been the relevant spec for a long, long time now. We use xdg for that now. Configs go in xdg_config_home.
Can’t we have both? Like some go there, and others go to the other place?
We do have both. That’s the whole complaint. There are still major applications using the decades obsolete standard. It was changed because it leaves your home directory a cluttered, useless mess. Also, if you really want your dotfiles in your home directory you can just set your xdg_config_home to your home directory instead of its default of .config.
Firefox asks me where to put my files though.
It’s about config files, not downloads
