this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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I can only imagine someone asking this if they a) don't use the terminal except if Stackexchange says they should and b) have yet to try and cleanup a system that's acquired cruft over a few years. If you don't care about it, then let me flip that around and ask why you care if people use XDG? The people who care about it are the people in the spaces that concern it.
Off the top of my head this matters because:
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Someone asking a question doesnt merit the insult of saying they "would never ask if they used a terminal." I have no particular dog in this fight, but not being a dick isn't that hard.
As to using this standard, just because this is your preferred standard, doesnt mean its the only standard.
It may actually be the best now, but so were the 14 others that came before it. Your stated reasons are the same reasons as everyone agreeing to use any other standard. Consistency, predictability, automation,ease of backup/restore, etc.
What sets this standard apart from all the rest? Based on their own description, they aren't even an official standard, just one in "very active" use.
So why this, specifically? Just because its what you're already doing?
This is true, and something that I'm working on. For some reason my brain is uncharitable in these situations and I interpret it not as a simple question but a sarcastically hostile put down in the form of a question. In this case, "Why would you be dumb and not just put things in /home". That really is a silly interpretation of the OP question, so I apologize.
Sure, but the OP was essentially asking "Why isn't dumping everything into a user's /home the standard? Why are you advocating for something different?"
There are a LOT of "unofficial standards" that are very impactful. System D can be considered among those. The page you link to does talk about a lot of specifications, but it also says that a lot of them are already under the XDG specification or the reason for XDG is to bring such a scheme under a single specification, i.e. XDG.
Weird to me that you apparently think the only way of viewing files is in a terminal
It's weird to me that you think I think that. I do primarily browse files by terminal, but not always. Before I got into heavy terminal use I was a power user of Nemo. In any case, dumping everything in /home does not make for a better gui file browsing experience, either
The implication seemed to be "if you don't care exactly where all your files are you must not use terminal". Which I still don't get. Just about anyone who would even be in a community like this uses terminal a lot anyway.