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Comment by demondemidi | Hacker News Reader

The one annoying thing macOS apps do is pollute /Library. Even apps that don’t explicitly write to this area end up with dozens of permafiles. Tons of stuff is spewed in there when you install an application that actually uses it. It’s like a directory version of a registry kitchen sink.

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Spare a thought for us Windows users - we went from our pristine and oddly beautiful home directories in Windows 7, where everything was neatly squared-away to either AppData\Roaming or AppData\Local - to our post-Electron, lazily-ported software world where my home directory now has no-less than twenty Unix-style dot-directories littering my %USERPROFILE%

Incidentally, the worst offender is Microsoft themselves: it all got worse with .nuget, .vs, .azcopy, .azdata, .azure, .azuredatastudio, .dotnet, etc. I just don't understand it.

Pristine? You mean the same home directory that contains the 80 character NTUSER files? ;)

Or the back-compat symlinks for NetHood, Start, Recent, SendTo, ah yes. I had a post-install VBScript that cleaned those out.

My current sad-thing I’m unhappy about is how the “My Documents” folder ended up being a second AppData folder, with lots of software storing settings, templates, project files, etc in that dir instead of AppData.

Windows absolutely needs application-silos to protect users from lazy apps. I hate to say it, but Apple was 100% right to make iPhone OS a file-system-free OS - we can’t do that on desktop, but gosh-darn-it, why is software so terrible? :(

My solution is to create another folder like “~/Documents/Projects” (because I have no free-standing documents really) and use it as “my” dir. All other paths are known to apps and will be abused.

I do the same thing (on win, mac, and linux). Except I call it "proj" because I'm lazy. In fact, I split it between github and proj because the former is already backed up, but the latter is not.

We Linux users suffer it. Supposedly, nowadays applications should store their files under ~/.config, ~/.local and ~/.cache, but you still find a million applications that create their own folders without following any standards. But at least file browsers hide those folders by default...

I'd have thought you could easily enable some fs-jail that maps any-and-every request matching /~/..+/i wherever you want?

I had never heard of it. Maybe it is possible, but I am too lazy to try it...

Do you have a link to documentation for that?

It's in the XDG Base Directory Specification [0] maintained by freedesktop.org [1] (formerly X Desktop Group)

0: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org

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