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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is safe. Everybody does it, there is .gitconfig, .ssh etc so one more would not hurt. Until there is 500 dotfiles, some long forgotten.
Manage your system. Do not expect someone else to manage it for you.
On the one hand this is annoying, on the other it’s great that you can just backup your home dir and have all your files and settings in one go. Also this annoyance is easy to solve, just make one dir in home (my is called after my name) and put all your own files in there.
So you're running everything under `/home/Epskampie/Epskampie` ?
This is not a problem. This is the design. It makes things completely controllable and you know where to look for configuration files.
If it was completely controllable, I’d have the ability to control where they are and put them out of my way. Lazy programmers use home as a default. Home directories have become the *nix version of the Windows Registry.
This isn't just a Linux problem. In Windows, the users /documents folder is polluted in exactly the same way these days.
It's a laziness issue, it won't be solved solely by making is easier to access the right locations on each system/platform, but that would be a step in the right direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Manage your system. Do not expect someone else to manage it for you.
That's an intellectually lazy thought. If everyone had that attitude we wouldn't have modern society at all (grow your food, don't expect someone else to grow it for you).
As time progressed it has become easy enough folks who dont know what they are doing can use many of the distributions.
Those folks are destroying what used to be a wonderful intelligent linux community.
To name and shame some culprits (the one's who have shame, I won't name java because I won't expect them to care) 1) Mozilla 2) Gnome 3) Gimp 4) GPG 5) Thunderbird (Why is there a sep directory and not under .mozilla) 6) mplayer I guess one reason why this occurs is that it's easier for to be carelessly cross-platform this way. Except you'd expect better from mozilla, specially because they store Windows stuff very w…
Why not _shame_ openssh? Or vim? Or emacs? I would advise not calling for shame on any of these projects because they have a pattern to support that has been in place longer than the XDG standard has been in place. You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved.
Why do programmers do this? What thought process leads to someone thinking this is a good idea?
It’s a convenient place to store user data that works across platforms.
FTFY.
If you don’t want to follow the spec, keep your program’s data in your program’s directory. If another program needs the data it can follow the $PATH, or ask the user.
Even better, ask the user at first run. You know, when asking people to accept some Byzantine EULA, license, and permission to track their grandmother.
In my opinion, having a conventional place to look for user configuration in plain text is a good thing, not a bad thing, and of course I would want it to be in the directory on my system where I'm the sole owner. As somebody else mentioned, this means backing up my personal settings and files is braindead simple, too.
Asking programmers to respect $XDG_HOME_CONFIG is not a bad idea, but it's no replacement for home directory hygiene. I believe that ultimately, cleanliness is a personal responsibility.
Edit: reduced smugness quotient while trying to preserve my argument. I apologize for the pre-edit tone issues with this post.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is safe. Everybody does it, there is .gitconfig, .ssh etc so one more would not hurt. Until there is 500 dotfiles, some long forgotten.
Manage your system. Do not expect someone else to manage it for you.