fraid I generated a tl;dr for this rather verbose article:

“Home directories are a mess because too many apps ignore XDG spec and dump dotfiles everywhere. The problem isn’t just legacy software—new apps do it too, often out of ignorance or laziness. Windows has similar issues with profile folders. Fixing it requires devs to actually follow standards, but many resist due to inertia or ‘my way is better’ thinking. Users should push back and demand proper XDG compliance to keep $HOME clean.”

While I enthusiastically agree with the whole thing, I can somewhat get behind RenderDoc’s “making it configurable would take some work”.

However, Flatpak’s “fucking cry about it” attitude is why I’ll avoid using Flatpak for as long as possible.

yes please. its a big peeve for me and thats not even exclusive to linux.

its dumb to be so contrarian about something like where the directory will go. be predictable for us and just respect the fucking standard, it will make everyones lives that little bit easier in the long run. mobile oses simply just force them to write in a specific directory, maybe its necessary here too.

auto main() -> int

What programming language is this even?!

I wish everything was put into ~/.config or whatever the proper place was. Oh you’re used to your ssh config being ~/.ssh as it has for years? So make a symlink! Everyone wins.

Here’s the closest thing we have to a solution: xdg-ninja

It looks in your home for known files and folders outside of the proper xdg locations and tells you if and how you can move them to their proper place

I have recentlly created a data directory in my home dir, and moved almost everything I need to it. Even configs and program data are in it somewhere I find ok, and symlinked to the xdg dirs (I know i can make my new location the xdg dir for config and data, but this way I selectively add stuff to my now main config, so it remains more pristine)