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Comment by deburo | Hacker News Reader

On Windows anyway, the root of the user profile is already filled with garbage directories, and so a few more dot-dirs and files feel par for the course. The advantage is that accessing your root dir is easier than typing out %appdata% in File Explorer.

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One could say the same for ~ on Linux. 'It's already bad' isn't an excuse for sloppy programming.

Software should ideally adhere to OS norms. Better still, software shouldn't be opaque about where global/user-specific cache/config data is stored, and should prompt users to choose (or set sane defaults, again adhering to OS norms).

IMO the video game industry is a big offender of home-folder pollution, with saves and configs being splattered all over %USERPROFILE%\Documents, %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\ (which is a legacy holdover from Windows XP), %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games (which does have a corresponding KNOWNFOLDERID), etc etc.

If it's any consolation, games from Steam on Linux leak files all over the place on that OS too.

Right now the offenders in my $HOME not following $XDG are games, LibreWolf via Mozilla, Xmonad, GnuPG, and anything related to npm (with their maintainers closing any issued opened about support $XDG).

When making games, I have them store their config in %APPDATA% on Windows, although I do see the downside if there's a bug and I want to direct a customer to send me a log file that was saved there or just generally delete or move files around in there. It's not as familiar and safe-feeling for a nontechnical user to navigate to %APPDATA% is it is to just look in their Documents.

SteamApps/userdata, %APPDATA%/Publisher, %APPDATA/Developer, %LOCALAPPDATA%, the list goes on...

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