I love you all very much but just please be aware that "the floor" is literally where the files are supposed to go, according to the spec. I don't like it, you don't like it, nobody likes it. But that's why it's happening.
Relevant section quoted for the lazy:
User specific configuration files for applications are stored in the user's home directory in a file that starts with the '.' character (a "dot file"). If an application needs to create more than one dot file then they should be placed in a subdirectory with a name starting with a '.' character, (a "dot directory"). In this case the configuration files should not start with the '.' character.
You know everything on that site was written in 2004 or earlier, right? That hasn't been the relevant spec for a long, long time now. We use xdg for that now. Configs go in xdg_config_home.
We do have both. That's the whole complaint. There are still major applications using the decades obsolete standard. It was changed because it leaves your home directory a cluttered, useless mess. Also, if you really want your dotfiles in your home directory you can just set your xdg_config_home to your home directory instead of its default of .config.
They probably just found an image of a pizza delivery guy and fitted it for the meme. I am not aware of any memes of pizza throwers other than Walter White
One particular pain for me in VSCode is that it puts a .vscode folder in my repo, which I have to specifically exclude from git every single time. I can't expect other users of the repo to use vscode, let alone my settings synced to git. In firefox, it sometimes gets tricky finding the profile folder, as it changes across distros. Similarly, I always find it difficult searching for service files (there are at least 4 folders that I now know of). All of this searching around and doing little things used to be irritating - though you get used to it, and figure out shortcuts. TBH - windows has some of this too - I had to customise a bunch of stuff on first boot.
No clue about Nvidia - I hear they make something called GPUs but I have not been able to afford any, so can't say I relate.
One particular pain for me in VSCode is that it puts a .vscode folder in my repo, which I have to specifically exclude from git every single time.
That's pretty standard behavior for IDEs. Like Jetbrains IDEs store their config in a .idea folder in the root of the workspace, Visual Studio has a config directory in the root of the workspace, xcode probably does the same thing... It's standard practice, and a simple thing to account for - as you said, just add it to your .gitignore and you're golden. That allows people to use whatever IDE they want and configure it however they like.
Interesting. The default gitignore in Windows at least for both vscode and visual studio exclude those directories along with obj, bin, etc and a bunch of other non code files.
In theory this issue can be solved with LD_PRELOAD trick. E.g. redirect all/most/some fopen calls to "$HOME" to some other directory. But before I try to tackle it myself: is there already a similar solution like that?
It's one thing when they have legacy hardcode mountains preventing a standardisation, but I really dislike developers who just disagree with the standard and take away the choice as well and justify it with some made up problems with that standard.
my favourite part is Steam throwing in a symlink, a broken symlink, and a directory of 4 files and 7 more symlinks that all point to a more reasonable point in ~/.local/share/steam/
Haha you just reminded me of that damn flashing broken steam sym link in my home folder, it's been there for years and I've yet to investigate or do anything about it.
Most software on Linux is configured to place their config files in ~/.config. Some others, like the ones in the pic, just dump them directly into your home folder.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is an environment variable that programs can (and should) read to determine the location for storing dotfiles (config files, kind of). Not reading (or caring about) the environment variable, and not adhering to the default of /home/username/.config/ results in them ending up in the home directory.
Many applications have configuration files. Historically these files were placed in your home directory aka "on the floor". The variable mentioned defines a directory where these files should go. Many applications ignore this.
The Windows equivilent would be instead of putting application data in the AppData folder, it throws it in Documents, My Games, or just in the home folder directly.
Better, it could be literally anywhere and there's nothing you can do about it. Also symlinks practically look like regular folders and files to most apps.
There’s no game related dirs in your My Documents dir? Most don’t even use My Games they just dump directly into My Documents. I guarantee most game devs don’t understand the difference between local and roaming either. They just put shit randomly wherever they want
I have almost nothing in my home directory, no. Been applying this to clean it up even further. I want my chezmoi dotfiles repo to be clean. Especially not games' files since I run Steam through flatpak. It does put things in ~/.var but at least it's collected to one point.
Not really a problem of "Linux" or "Windows", but more of "developers".
That's why i prefer to use Wine for games. Just change the symlinks in C:/users/<you> to somewhere sane, like .local/Games/<game>/save. Guess you could also use the variables in .config/user-dirs.dirs while creating the prefix, but i haven't tested that yet.
So in linux you have an extra directory just for configuration files/directories wich often start with a . (Dot) (that's why they are calld dot files). But some applications dont use that directory but rather just dump them into your user directory, wich causes it to get cluttered with files wich should be put into the ".config" directory
