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Comment by UI_at_80x24 | Hacker News Reader

My annoyance is that they create any 'helpful' directories. It's just as bad on Windows. "Download", "Pictures", "3D crap", etc....

Nope, fuck that.

This is my $home, I'll make it look how I want.

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You may indeed prefer an empty canvas you have full control over.

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.

The choice not to create these directories basically doesn't exist, because all sorts of software will automatically create them if they don't exist, their creation isn't centrally orchestrated. A while back I was using a minimal i3-based desktop and when I launched transmission-gtk it thought I might want a "Downloads" folder, and would create it whenever it launched, even though it had been configures to download files elsewhere.

I was not aware of that behaviour. I agree that should not happen. Or the user should be asked if they want that. This should very much be under the control of the system and the apps the user chooses to manage the system. In a capability-based OS, apps would not be able to misbehave like this, unless granted the capability.

That not really true. Most desktop environments will create the directories on session startup but depending on the DE that behavior can be disabled (in xfce for example has a service in the session you can disable).

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.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

> This is my $home, I'll make it look how I want.

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.

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