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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#351

Post by jamiepenney »

SpaceManiac wrote: post #242
user5994461 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fair to store documents and saved games in My Documents. Much better than storing them in C:\Windows or C:\Program Files, as was the case a decade ago, before windows introduced UAC and blocked write access to these.

It's senseless to store files that don't have user-facing meaning in My Documents. I know games that use it varyingly for web caches, shader caches, binary config files, debug logs, Lua scripts, downloaded mods, and even executables . And while arguably most gamers understand what save files are , they can't be double-clicked to open them, so I don't consider them documents (Maybe this is pedantic). All this kind of…

I haven't used My Documents for documents for years now. The directory is useless because of all the cruft, I store useful things elsewhere now.

Re: Dotfile madness

#352

Post by tomjakubowski »

akerro wrote: post #207
fxfan wrote: post #16

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…

cmake, conky, dlv, electron, electrum, gnome, gnutls, gradle, idea, ipfs, kde, maven, npm, ohmyzsh, sonar, steam, thunderbird, veracrypt, vim, visualvm, vscode, yarn. and now the most fun: bash, zsh, git, gtk, man, wget, xorg

git has supported ~/.config/git/config for a very long time. You don't have to use ~/.gitconfig.

Re: Dotfile madness

#353

Post by fiatjaf »

pletnes wrote: post #287
fiatjaf wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the whole Snap thing. Not a single snap has ever worked in any of my computers in the past 5 years (I've tried maybe 5 or 6), and they always say they'll add themselves to the system. Add where? Where are these beasts hiding?

I just «snap install pycharm» and it shows up ready for work. Never had an issue with a snap. Can’t recall where it’s stored, but that’s easy to determine with «which». This is on ubuntu 1{6,8}.04 fwiw.

Oh, I was talking about AppImage, not Snap. Sorry.

I actually tried the Snap thing too, I don't remember how it went but I would say it was bad. I think I couldn't find a way to search for packages from the CLI.

Re: Dotfile madness

#354

Post by Aeolun »

nycticorax wrote: post #119

To me, the real problem is not the dotfiles, but the regular (i.e. non-hidden) files that applications surreptitiously create in my home folder. (Which the author does mention as being particularly bad.) dotfiles in the home folder are not a new thing on Linux (e.g. .bashrc, .profile, .emacs, etc.), even if it would be better if more applications used the XDG folders. And if I don't see them when I "ls", they don't b…

I have great difficulty understanding why the snap developers think the excuse “it’s hard to change!” flies.

If it’s hard to change, you should’ve either fixed your architecture from the start, or thought a bit harder about the implications of magically creating a new directory in $HOME.

Re: Dotfile madness

#355

Post by Spivak »

jeffchien wrote: post #303
ljm wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strongly reminds me of installing software on Windows, where most games and programs would use My Documents as a dumping ground.

If it's the entire game, it might be to allow kids to install the game without administrator privilege (read: parental knowledge/consent), though I agree that letting people choose would be best.

If your kid can write and execute in any directory on your system then they can run whatever software they like.

Re: Dotfile madness

#356

Post by amlib »

themodelplumber wrote: post #226
rovr138 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what the article talks about. How applications should use $XDG_DATA_HOME, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_CACHE_HOME and some defaults if they’re not set.

I'm not seeing it. Where does XDG define when and how an app should use: /home/user/Documents/ /home/user/Downloads/ /home/user/Pictures/ /home/user/Videos/ Let me know what I'm missing.

You should be able to change the default settings for these directories by changing /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults (system-wide) and ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs (users override)

Re: Dotfile madness

#357

Post by Spivak »

bscphil wrote: post #275
nycticorax wrote: post #119

To me, the real problem is not the dotfiles, but the regular (i.e. non-hidden) files that applications surreptitiously create in my home folder. (Which the author does mention as being particularly bad.) dotfiles in the home folder are not a new thing on Linux (e.g. .bashrc, .profile, .emacs, etc.), even if it would be better if more applications used the XDG folders. And if I don't see them when I "ls", they don't b…

Lots of programming languages and IDEs seem to do this. Rosegarden (the sequencer) and Steam (last time I tried anyway) both create folders right under my home folder as well. Barbarism is right.

Use the flatpak for Steam! It makes almost all my headaches with the platform disappear including the .steam directory.

Re: Dotfile madness

#358

Post by ChrisSD »

user5994461 wrote: post #334
ChrisSD wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As noted below there's a special folder called "Saved Games" that's specifically meant for this purpose. A lot of games still don't use it.

To be fair it's widely used now, it just took a while to adopt because of compatibility issues. Finding the directory requires new APIs introduced in Vista and Server 2008. See SHGetKnownFolderPath

Sure but in the non-game software world we'd do a runtime check to see if the OS was Vista or later and fallback if not.

Re: Dotfile madness

#359

Post by Spivak »

paulddraper wrote: post #276
sakoht wrote: post #252

The real problem is that any app I run accesss all files I own with equal permissions. App1 and App2 shouldn’t write their data to my home, or read each other’s data, or, please, be able to write each other’s data. A video game can read my tax forms. WTF. Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. Until then, basically every app should run in a docker container. Then it can do what it wants.

AppArmor and SELinux address this problem. But -- speaking from experience -- they are painful to use; most users prefer convenience over heightened security.

They're painful to set up yourself, but that's pretty much true of all current sandboxing approaches. If you just let your distro do it and follow their conventions it you barely notice.

Re: Dotfile madness

#360

Post by GregMartinez »

akerro wrote: post #207
fxfan wrote: post #16

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…

cmake, conky, dlv, electron, electrum, gnome, gnutls, gradle, idea, ipfs, kde, maven, npm, ohmyzsh, sonar, steam, thunderbird, veracrypt, vim, visualvm, vscode, yarn. and now the most fun: bash, zsh, git, gtk, man, wget, xorg

dlv has an open PR to move the config from $HOME/.dlv to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dlv so that one should be fixed soon.
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