this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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If you care, please take time to upvote or file bugs on packages that don't follow XDG. Or even better, make PRs.
A (very well used) program I use places files in $HOME. Someone argued for changing to $XDG_CONFIG or at least add that as an option. The dev, being used to the old school way, gave the exact opposite reason: that .config was just an extra level of organization when dotfiles are what the home dir is for. So I'm not sure how successful you would be with that approach.
To be clear, I am clearly on the side of XDG, myself.
XDG is a Red Hat thing.
Stuff outside of their influence is unlikely to change, like OpenSSH or ZSH.
Old things like that get a pass. New tools and frameworks should definitely obey the standards.
Those bugs and PRs would just get closed without comment. Nobody is going to move a dotfile as a breaking change in any established software. You either get it right the first time or probably never.
They will if enough people whine about it.
In the old days (I'm 50+) tumbleweed drifted through ~/ apart from my drivel and I'd have a folder for that so /home/gerdesj/docs was the root of my stuff. I also had ~/tmp/ for not important stuff. I don't have too much imagination and ~/ was pretty clean. I was aware of dot files and there were a shit load of them but I didn't see them unless I wanted to.
This really isn't the most important issue ever but it would be nice if apps dumped their shit in a consistently logical way. XDG is the standard.
We have oodles of counterexamples to this. GIMP did it, Blender did it, DOSBox did it, Libreoffice did it, Skype did it, Wireshark did it, ad nauseum. It's not really as big a deal as you make it to be (or a big deal at all). You have a transitional period where you look for config files in both locations, and mark the old location as obsolete.
The software can read from both locations in a backwards compatible way. Many tools already do this.