I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
This is the big thing I miss from my “pre-Unix” Mac days. In OS9 and earlier, apps were self contained, and didn’t spread their garbage everywhere. You deleted an app, you deleted all the app. Granted, there was a tradeoff (the parade of conflicting control panels and extensions you had to manually diagnose when your machine went sideways) but I never understood why in the Windows and Linux worlds devs would code so sloppily. Who told that dev my Documents folder is where their nonsense needs to go? That Documents folder is for my use, not theirs.
Still salty after all these years
I use linux and this annoys me to, every program just spams my home directory with config files, even though .config and .cache exist and are the standard
Programming tools/IDEs seem especially egregious.
Set XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<path> in your environment and most tools follow it
I have, unfortunatly a lot of programs dont.
xdg-ninja can help
Right, forgot. And the specific workaround.
Run
ls -al | wc -lto see the mess. If you can get it below 25, you have a clean setup.@araquen @TheBaldness This only makes sense when the ratio of computers to users is exactly one. If more than one person uses the same computer, you don’t want person A’s favourite settings interfering with person B. On the flip side, a person who uses more than one computer wants to easily bring their settings with them from one computer to the next. The bits that personalise the experience should be stored in the person’s personal space.
There is no good answer. Put the configs in the app’s location, now every ordinary user needs write access to where programs are stored, just to store their preferences. Virus-writer’s paradise. Put them in the personal folders and now you have all this cruft and crap leftover from programs long since forgotten and uninstalled. It’s neither sloppy note careless. It’s a hard problem that doesn’t have a simple elegant answer that’s perfect for everyone.
I get where you’re coming from, but this seems to have been the “lazy” answer, and is certainly not a consumer-friendly solution. Ideally there would have been dedicated directories for application configs where the application has permission to write, and the Documents folder would have been left alone.
On the Mac, these days, I believe “Application Support” fills this role, but there are still recalcitrant applications that default to the user’s Documents folder. That said, the devs in my company had to end up using the Documents folder for one of our products, something to do with Apple’s security, so I do sympathize. It’s just irksome, especially when you have to get another app to clean up after the apps you’ve installed because those apps uninstallers do not clean up everything.
Microsoft did for a while. 😜
There are so many places that games decide to put their save files on Windows.
I’ve got save directories in:
There’s probably other places. Not sure how much the registry is used for saves, either, but that would complicate backups more than they already are.
I’d love if they just unify save and config data for games to %APPDATA%. Documents should never be touched by software without the user’s explicit consent, though, and because of the situation, the Documents directory is the last place I ever put actual documents.