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Spare a thought for us Windows users - we went from our pristine and oddly beautiful home directories in Windows 7, where everything was neatly squared-away to

Spare a thought for us Windows users - we went from our pristine and oddly beautiful home directories in Windows 7, where everything was neatly squared-away to either AppData\Roaming or AppData\Local - to our post-Electron, lazily-ported software world where my home directory now has no-less than twenty Unix-style dot-directories littering my %USERPROFILE% Incidentally, the worst offender is Microsoft themselves: it all got worse with .nuget, .vs, .azcopy, .azdata, .azure, .azuredatastudio, .dotnet, etc. I just don't understand it.

demondemidi 3y ago
Pristine? You mean the same home directory that contains the 80 character NTUSER files? ;)
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Or the back-compat symlinks for NetHood, Start, Recent, SendTo, ah yes. I had a post-install VBScript that cleaned those out. My current sad-thing I’m unhappy about is how the “My Documents” folder ended up being a second AppData folder, with lots of software storing settings, templates, project files, etc in that dir instead of AppData. Windows absolutely needs application-silos to protect users from lazy apps. I hate to say it, but Apple was 100% right to make iPhone OS a file-system-free OS - we can’t do that on desktop, but gosh-darn-it, why is software so terrible? :(
  - wruza 3y ago
    My solution is to create another folder like “~/Documents/Projects” (because I have no free-standing documents really) and use it as “my” dir. All other paths are known to apps and will be abused.
    - demondemidi 3y ago
      I do the same thing (on win, mac, and linux). Except I call it "proj" because I'm lazy. In fact, I split it between github and proj because the former is already backed up, but the latter is not.
pezezin 3y ago
We Linux users suffer it. Supposedly, nowadays applications should store their files under ~/.config, ~/.local and ~/.cache, but you still find a million applications that create their own folders without following any standards. But at least file browsers hide those folders by default...
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  I'd have thought you could easily enable some fs-jail that maps any-and-every request matching /~/..+/i wherever you want?
  - pezezin 3y ago
    I had never heard of it. Maybe it is possible, but I am too lazy to try it...
- winterplace 3y ago
  Do you have a link to documentation for that?
  - pimlottc 3y ago
    It's in the XDG Base Directory Specification [0] maintained by freedesktop.org [1] (formerly X Desktop Group) 0: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org

demondemidi 3y ago

Pristine? You mean the same home directory that contains the 80 character NTUSER files? ;)

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
Or the back-compat symlinks for NetHood, Start, Recent, SendTo, ah yes. I had a post-install VBScript that cleaned those out. My current sad-thing I’m unhappy about is how the “My Documents” folder ended up being a second AppData folder, with lots of software storing settings, templates, project files, etc in that dir instead of AppData. Windows absolutely needs application-silos to protect users from lazy apps. I hate to say it, but Apple was 100% right to make iPhone OS a file-system-free OS - we can’t do that on desktop, but gosh-darn-it, why is software so terrible? :(
- wruza 3y ago
  My solution is to create another folder like “~/Documents/Projects” (because I have no free-standing documents really) and use it as “my” dir. All other paths are known to apps and will be abused.
  - demondemidi 3y ago
    I do the same thing (on win, mac, and linux). Except I call it "proj" because I'm lazy. In fact, I split it between github and proj because the former is already backed up, but the latter is not.

pezezin 3y ago

We Linux users suffer it. Supposedly, nowadays applications should store their files under ~/.config, ~/.local and ~/.cache, but you still find a million applications that create their own folders without following any standards. But at least file browsers hide those folders by default...

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
I'd have thought you could easily enable some fs-jail that maps any-and-every request matching /~/..+/i wherever you want?
- pezezin 3y ago
  I had never heard of it. Maybe it is possible, but I am too lazy to try it...
winterplace 3y ago
Do you have a link to documentation for that?
- pimlottc 3y ago
  It's in the XDG Base Directory Specification [0] maintained by freedesktop.org [1] (formerly X Desktop Group) 0: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org