Don't worry Rob. Freedesktop.org learned and spammed my home dir with Desktop/Document/Downloads/Music/etc/etc/etc...
These presets only serve to confuse or at best annoy. These directories were well-intentioned originally but proved to be a huge mistake. They need to go away.
(Edit: The above rant applies only to Downloads/Music/Video/etc. I think ~/.config and ~/.local are fine. I have no problem using those as intended, and I've seen plenty of other people using them too.)
It is a little weird to see htem on a server OS install though
Apple software tries to organize files but it's a disaster: iTunes used to download movies to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Movies, now TV.app downloads them to ~/Movies/TV/Media/Movies (!), and videos I shoot on my iPhone end up in ~/Pictures.
Should my game saves go in Documents? What about Documents/My Games/Publisher? What about %APPDATA%/Publisher? Hell there's even a few in ~/My Games. Every new game, figuring out where the save data went is an adventure and it's cluttered up every folder it touches. And now for whatever reason everyone is being pushed to put user data in %APPDATA%, which I don't consistently remember how to get to without that shortcut. So who knows!
I just looked up the save data location for Subnautica and it is (I shit you not): %AppData%\..\LocalLow\Unknown Worlds\Subnautica\Subnautica\SavedGames
Edit: clarified what I mean by the Appdata folder
IIRC at one point you couldn't even open one of the "AppData" homefolder aliases, Explorer would spit out some error message and you'd have to navigate to the hidden folder or key it in manually.
Really, you use all of them? When you go on vacation and take some pictures and video of your family, do you then split those files between ~/Video/Beach2022/ and ~/Pictures/Beach2022?
I've never seen anybody do this, not on Windows, MacOS, or any linux DE. Instead you get something like ~/Desktop/Beach2022 or ~/Downloads/vacations/Beach2022 or generally, a single directory anywhere (often on a USB harddrive, not their home directory at all), but never do those vacation files get split by filetype into ~/Videos and ~/Pictures, that seems like utter madness to me.
Not a safe assumption, annoyingly. Debian doesn't use tmpfs for /tmp; I guess they expect you to use /dev/shm if you want a tmpfs.
(Well, it exists in freebsd, but not openbsd, no clue if it exists in netbsd/minix)
~/Documents is there because Freedesktop.org somehow thought they were dealing with Windows and tried to port the solution of problems Linux does not have. The other directories aren't used on any OS and only serve to annoy people.
What do you do instead?
I organize my files by subject, not file type.
My files about space stuff go in a directory called 'space'. Files about the space shuttle go in space/shuttle. This directory contains any sort of file related to the space shuttle, be it picture, video, pdf, epub, or otherwise. I don't see any utility in breaking this directory apart into ~/Pictures/shuttle, ~/Videos/shuttle, ~/Documents/shuttle... Do you really do something like that? How far do you take this "different files, different hierarchies" principle? Do pdfs and docx go in two different hierarchies too? Are pngs and jpegs separated? What's your criteria for deciding when different sorts of files get different hierarchies?
Likewise, I'm not using ~/Documents just for stuff with an .odt or .pdf extension. Rather, any sort of human-readable text based file goes there. I have some markdown files that have embedded images, and of course the .png or .svg files exist alongside them in the relevant directories.
~/Music is probably the best example of why the default XDG approach makes sense. You can place everything in an Artist/Album hierarchy, and most music software is written to automatically pick up and scan these directories to keep their internal libraries in sync. There's no fuss.
I don't limit myself to just the XDG directories when there's not a close fit; i also have a ~/Projects for various things I've made and ~/Programs for statically built programs that can't be installed, and so on.
Basically, I've found that the XDG approach does a pretty good job of splitting up files by purpose, allowing you to compartmentalize by avoiding having too many directories at the top level of the hierarchy.
The concept that files are cross-compatible, and usable outside the app that created them, is increasingly foreign to an online app oriented world.
I am more likely to do something with those files than if they are hidden away in Downloads (which is like a tempdir), or on windows, some User/Documents subfolder somewhere.
I wish I could! But ~/Desktop and ~/Downloads keep getting re-created by ... something :-/ I tried setting XDG_{DESKTOP,DOWNLOAD}_DIR but it seems to get ignored. Been annoying me for years.
Perhaps something like:
ln -s /dev/null ~/Desktop
ln -s /dev/null ~/Downloads
etc.
Overall I think it would be productive to go back and redesign these old folders, even if it breaks some stuff if only to better reflect the way the new generation of consumers understands tech. There are probably a lot of young people who have never used a PC before, and will be confused coming into them with a background of smartphones and tablets.
Maybe we should eliminate the Desktop folder completely, and only allow adding widgets/app launchers/shortcuts to the desktop rather than files. Using the desktop as a folder has always been a questionable practice since you can't even see it when you have a window open.
At the very least, we should get rid of the "Templates" folder. I still have no idea wtf that's meant to be used for.
Seconded. I'm irrationally annoyed that it gets created and sometimes filled with .desktop files while my DE doesn't even use it.
> At the very least, we should get rid of the "Templates" folder. I still have no idea wtf that's meant to be used for.
You can place files in the "Templates" dir to serve as templates for the "right-click > new document" feature in nautilus and some other file explorers.
xdg-user-dirs-update --set MUSIC ~/.xdg-user-dir/musicNope, fuck that.
This is my $home, I'll make it look how I want.
However, creating these folders by default is actually beneficial to most users. Most users (especially the vast majority that transitioned from Windows) expect these folders to exist.
I believe the choice to not create these existed and still exists. Yet either all the distros that made that choice are history or they all made the opposite choice.
I can say the same about other choices. I vastly prefer having a TRRS headphone jack and expandable storage on a phone. These do not appear to be priorities for most people.
It is true that applications will create these directories if they don't exist. But you can fix this by setting the XDG user directories[0] to something that isn't in your home directory. I set them all to a subdirectory under `~/.xdg-user-dir/`, but you could just as easily set them to `/tmp`. Nothing has recreated ~/Documents on my system in years.
I have long since accepted that it’s not my $home after all, but rather a general purpose application config dumping ground. My actual “home” is now a top level directory used only by me.
Using unveil() and pledge(), OpenBSD hides many $HOME and system directories from Firefox and chrome. Thus an errant javascript will only see things in ~/Downloads
So one nice use for these.
https://github.com/peteryates/dotfiles/blob/master/xdg/.conf...
Part of which is making sure that the defaults the program chooses may be overridden by consistent environment variables.
Programs need some way to persist their own state and configuration, after all.
The fact that XDG is more honored in the breach is tiresome, but this can at least be corrected, and it's well enough put together to be a steady-state approach to wrangling dotfiles.
To expand on this, when a program gets installed, it should write its binary location in a file, then if you ever erase it, a doesthisexistanymore $Config/dir/*/symlink | remove_entire_configuration_directory should be run via cron daily.
No manual cleanup, ever.