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I don't get the XDG appeal of having all the data of an app scattered all over the home dir when I can just have a .dir of an app with everything inside.

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Backups. If a program properly follows the spec I can just `rsync ~/.config/foo` or store it in a repo and not have to worry about it. If a program doesn't follow the spec I now have to write program specific filters for rsync/custom .gitignore entries to avoid backing up state and cache. Now multiply that across dozens of programs written by lazy devs who don't want to write 12 lines of code to determine the correct location for their files.

This exactly. My rsync patterns file is littered with dozens of edge cases to capture the configs and ignore state/caches of stuff that doesn't follow XDG. Really dislike the chore of double checking everything and adding new stuff to the list every time I take a backup.

Even worse are those that seemingly follow XDG but not really, like a lot of Electron apps, that just shove config, state and cache in ~/.config.... sigh

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