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Comment by bauerd | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the problem. Why bother where dotfiles are written to? GUI file managers and userland tools hide them by default. What would I gain by having them written outside of $HOME?

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It is useful to have hidden files shown by default (.gitignore, .config, etc). And not everyone uses GUI file managers all day.

Home directory is the default directory for terminal emulators, and having it polluted to me feels like sitting in a dirty room.

Some of us like to pretend that we own our personal computer, not whatever developer deigns to allow their software to run on it.

Easier to version your configs if they're all in one place. Easier to find a config file, less guess-work. Generally helps keep the home directory tidy of cruft. Not a huge deal, obviously, but programs should be well-behaved programs.

It avoids the realization that you have been paying AWS to back up ~/.cache and ~/.local for the last 6 months.

The whole point of .cache is that it's supposed to be that one folder that you know you shouldn't back up. As opposed to a dozen different app-specific ones that we have today.

Yes, it's a great idea in principle -- and would be even better if its location were configurable, per the XDG spec.

My comment wasn't meant as a criticism of the basic idea of a standard directory scheme; it was a reply to someone asking why anyone would ever care about files you can't see.

Point of order: Some of us really want ~/.local backed up or otherwise persisted; I've got the equivalent of a second /usr in there, and I only don't worry about "backing it up" because ~/.local/etc is in version control, and the rest is installed by my setup scripts.

~/.cache can burn, though:)

The article says the standard is to put data in ~/.local/share/

So I guess if any of your applications have important data, you better back it up! (I learned today)

Keybase stores 1.1 GB of garbage* in mine. I think it's a cache of the network filesystem.

* My definition of "garbage" in this context is stuff I don't miss if I wipe the machine, reinstall the OS and the app, and sign in again.

Not everyone has a large $HOME directory. It might be mounted on a 128mb thumbdrive for all you know.

Esoteric setups aside, I'd be interested to hear about problems that people actually have encountered with this convention.

My partner has to manage having a 500MB quota on their home directory at work. A couple of times a month something decides to dump 300+ MB of data in there and break everything.

A 300MB file isn't a preferences file, though.

Apps use dotfiles or dotdirs for caching data. Think browser caches. That's the point of the standard... All the non essential caching data lives in one place and so is easy to prune when needed.

Even better; it means that your preferences will be literally portable.

Yep, until your program crashes because you weren't expecting a 10b file to run out of disk space.

Preferences files tend to be pretty small; I'd be rather surprised even if a 128MB thumb drive couldn't store them all. The bulk of the space will almost certainly be consumed by other things.

You cannot and should never assume that dotfiles are just preference files. They might be directories, and those directories might be chock full of big files — or worse, temp files that should really be in /tmp.

Why eat an appetizer, main course and dessert separately? Just put them in the blender and gulp in the goo... Also because entropy.

I don’t use a GUI on servers. I use a terminal on my laptop all the timr. I also have dot files always visible in my GUI.

Many of us don’t use GUI file managers so why should our neighborhoods be considered dumping grounds?

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