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Comment by drunkpotato | Hacker News Reader

Luckily if you’re a developer on MacOS, you can have that too! In addition to ~/.config and a million .dotfiles and .dotdirectories from decades of unixy tools! Truly a cornucopia.

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It's frustrating enough to make a person seriously consider maintaining forks of all the FOSS things they use to fix this one bit of misbehavior.

Do any of the Linux distros do this? Strikes me as the kind of thing Debian would do for everything in apt

Do you have any examples of Debian doing this?

Sure. In software of mine distributed by Debian, there's usually a "debian/patches" directory, that I didn't add, that's changes the Debian project wanted to make to the system. I'm sure there's a formal name for that system. Most Debian packages seem to have one.

Start with pythons “projectdirs”, which refuses to allow mac systems to use XDG or at least have that option.

https://github.com/platformdirs/platformdirs/issues/4

In Windows we get dotfiles from any tool badly ported from unixland, plus the myriad ways specified by various Windows standards over the past several decades, plus the innumerable ways that different entities have chosen to interpret those standards, plus whatever bullshit non-standard locations some asshole thought up and decided to ship.

Where is the config for program X?

It could be in the same directory as X, HKLM\Software\X, HKCU\Software\X, The HKLM\Software\XWOW6432Node\X, AppData\Local\X, AppData\Remote\X, AppData\LocalLow\X, ProgramData\X, USERPROFILE\.X, USERPROFILE\Documents\X, USERPROFILE\Saved Games\X, USERPROFILE\Documents\My Saved Games\X, USERPROFILE\.config\X...

Yep. Makes backing up configurations on Windows systems somewhat nightmarish… it's most practical to just back up the whole install and then pray that you'll never have to go digging for any specific bit of config in particular.

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