I absolutely despise the following directories: Documents, Music, Pictures, Public, Templates, Videos. Why? Because applications randomly dump stuff into these directories and fill them with junk files. I don’t want any application putting anything into directories I actually use, unless I explicitly tell them to. It is not possible to keep your files organized if applications randomly dump trash files into them.

I’d like to set nautilus to show hidden files, but I can’t stand the amount of “trash” there’s in home

Everyone is thinking “my app is the best, it totally deserves a ~/.myappisthebest directory”

Y’know what’s worse? When there’s no dot. Worse than that, it’s an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒

I just write my config files directly to random unused blocks on /dev/sda, filesystems are overrated.

One of my greatest pet peeves is random folders appearing in my home folder. Thanks for this

Tangentially related: I recently learned that there are tools for handling dotfiles such as chezmoi and yadm. I would suppose that after spending some time on backing up the dotfiles that matter one can purge the remainders without much issue. I also remember some tool that was made for the purpose of cleaning $HOME, but can not recall its name (if anyone knows please let me know).

W should make a .dotfiles directory for them.

Is there any good gui application for mange these but also edit them in a user friendly way like getting a dropdown for a settings like: Yes/No, Country Sweden. Number size range etc. So include validation. Even nix os does not have that.

I’m new to Linux. Should I be using something like chezmoi?

Also if the normal invocation of your program produces more than 3k lines of stdout, sanitize it and default to a file.

You might wanna backup your dotfiles somewhere remote too. I literally lost dotfiles that I’d been building up for years because I couldn’t remember the password to my Linux machine after coming back from vacation. Funny enough though, a couple hours after nuking my OS I magically remember my password.

They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and ~/.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

That sounds like it’s a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won’t work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire ~/.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

less secure,

If your home directory is “not secure”, you’re probably in trouble already.

Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don’t start with a dot in people’s home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under ~/m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

• A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user’s home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.

• WINE apparently has decided that it’s a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.

• Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.

• A few logfiles

Hmmmmmm

No.

It needed to be said.

I hate it when an application puts its configuration data in its own dotfile under $HOME instead in ~/.config. Also hate it when caches are stored in ~/.config, because then I have to manually tag those subdirectories for exclusion before doing a backup.