• AKADAP@lemmy.ml
    692·
    9 months ago

    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.

      • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
        17·
        9 months ago

        The apps dumping files into foldes like Documents usually don’t care about the XDG_user_directories spec, iirc.

    • akash_rawal@lemmy.world
      51·
      9 months ago

      I just keep my stuff far away from $HOME and not bother about the junk. Not even a subdirectory under $HOME.

      Same goes for ’ My documents’ on windows.

    • Tiger Jerusalem@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 months ago

      These places are a cesspool of junk in every system, it’s incredible. MacOS has this kind of shit too, just like Windows, with apps dumping crap there without a care.

    • BeeMe@beehaw.org
      1·
      9 months ago

      This is why I’ve made a “Filing Cabinet” directory. My stuff goes in there nice and organized, while I ignore the rest.

  • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    25·
    9 months ago

    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. 😒

  • guckfoogle@sh.itjust.works
    23·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • pitbuster@lemmy.mlEnglish
      261·
      9 months ago

      Unless you disk was encrypted, you could have booted up a live distro and back up the files you needed (or even overwrite the shadow file to get a new password)

      • Frater Mus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        In the late 90s I taught an intro course for folks who wanted to run *nix boxen (Solaris, IIRC). On the afternoon of the last day I had them swap places after lunch and gain root access to each others’ machines. It was partly for root passwd recovery and other maintenance tasks, but also to demonstrate that physical access to the box was a serious issue.

    • conc@lemmy.ml
      17·
      9 months ago

      After two years of typing in the same boot pass on my same laptop at my same job I woke up one day and couldn’t remember it. Almost died trying. Right as I was reaching out to my admin it came to me.

    • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      9 months ago

      Oof. Yeah, I once forgot my LastPass password literally less than 30 seconds after entering it on another device. Muscle memory versus active memory kind of thing.

      • ares35@kbin.social
        2·
        9 months ago

        i couldn’t recite my most-used passwords if i tried. i would need to ‘air type’ them out while doing so.

  • gnutrino@programming.dev
    241·
    9 months ago

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

  • Gleddified@lemmy.ca
    20·
    9 months ago

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

    • unalivejoy@lemm.eeEnglish
      25·
      9 months ago

      Let’s count them. (not including legacy or standard locations like .local, .config, or .cache, .ssh, and shell configuration files

      • .aws
      • .azure
      • .bun
      • .byobu
      • .cargo
      • .dbus
      • .docker
      • .dokku
      • .keychain
      • .kube
      • .minikube
      • .motd_shown
      • .node_repl_history
      • .npm
      • .nuxt
      • .nuxtrc
      • .nvm
      • .oh-my-zsh
      • .pack
      • .psql_history
      • .pyenv
      • .python_history
      • .redhat
      • .ruff_cache
      • .rustup
      • .selected_editor
      • .sqlite_history
      • .sudo_as_admin_successful
      • .tmux.conf
      • .tox
      • .ts_node_repl_history
      • .vim
      • .viminfo
      • .vimrc
      • .vscode-server
      • .wget-hsts
      • .yarn

      And a couple more, non-hidden files for Go.

      • go
      • sdk/go1.20
      • WasPentalive@beehaw.org
        3·
        9 months ago

        Why aren’t all of these just normal directories under either .local (for data files) or .config (for configuration)???

        Actually, I think the XDG directories should be under a single XDG directory either dotted or not (a better name would be OK with me) ~/xdg/Documents, ~/xdg/Music, ~/xdg/Pictures etc.

        • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
          5·
          9 months ago

          That’s the beauty: XDG compliant applications are entirely configurable using standardized environment variables.

        • unalivejoy@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          Documents, Music, etc actually are configurable. Just edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

          • WasPentalive@beehaw.org
            1·
            9 months ago

            I also had to (under KDE)

            • Edit the settings for each of the folders in Dolphin (The file manager)

            • Edit the location of the desktop folder in the settings found by right-clicking the desktop and going into “Configure Desktop and Wallpaper” Location.

            • Edit the show item by choosing Custom Location, and adding the XDG directory for the desktop. This setting may not stick.

  • Urist@lemmy.mlEnglish
    18·
    9 months ago

    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).

  • Moonrise2473@lemmy.ml
    11·
    9 months ago

    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”

  • tal@kbin.social
    7·
    9 months ago

    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

    • PlexSheep@feddit.de
      4·
      9 months ago

      I agree with most of your points, but I still think putting configs in the xdg dir instead of putting tons of dotfiles in $HOME is good practice.

      I find dotfiles to be that stuff that I want to edit easily, and xdg stuff to be that stuff that I don’t edit frequently (manually at least)

    • PixxlMan@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 months ago

      Somehow I’ve never considered using git for version controlling/version synchronizing anything other than exclusively code… Brb gonna git all my files.

      • JetpackJackson@feddit.de
        4·
        9 months ago

        Ah true. Bash doesn’t bug me as much as Zotero cause at least it’s a .bashrc file. With Zotero it’s a whole folder! In $HOME! Absolute madness!

      • sickday@kbin.social
        1·
        9 months ago

        You can manage symlinks pretty easy with home-manager. I’d personally setup symlinks for these app configuration directories if I don’t want them storing files directly on the disk I use for $HOME. It’s also done in a delcarative way that can persist across multiple computers.

        • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          I’m not sure I understand. So you create a symlink from $HOME/.program.ini to something in the nix store? If so, how does that solve the problem of clutter in $HOME ?

  • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    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.