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You need root permissions to write to these locations. For personal installations you should use $XDG_DATA_HOME: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir

You need root permissions to write to these locations. For personal installations you should use $XDG_DATA_HOME: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/#variables https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/#... and then create symlinks to binaries in $HOME/.local/bin.

hnlmorg 2y ago
“should” is massively overstating things here. For starters, it’s not a UNIX thing. It’s really more a Linux thing. Some Unixes have also adopted it but not enough for someone to argue that someone “should” be using it in reply to an article about Unix more generally. Secondly, XDG stems from managing desktop applications. Granted there’s no reason it can’t nor shouldn’t be used for CLI tools too. But equally there isn’t any reason why someone needs to use it. And on headless platforms, it makes zero sense to enforce XDG over any other Unix standard. Lastly, XDG is surprising complicated. Your example of symlinks et al demonstrates just how much additional work you’re doing just to follow XDG here. If you CLI tool doesn’t spew dozens of config files in $HOME then your recommendation isn’t any better than the one in the article. I really want to like XDG but like many things that originated from Linux, it’s far from an elegant solution to a simple problem and barely supported outside of Linux too. So I can’t blame anyone for deciding not to bother with it for their own personal software on their personal systems.
- nmz 2y ago
  For starters, It's not really a linux thing, Xorg runs everywhere, from BSDs to even windows. Secondly, XDG is a much better standard than FHS and actually supports normal users, needing to be root to install a random application is a security vulnerability waiting to happen. Lastly XDG is not complicated at all. its around 10 envvars pointing to directories that you have to mkdir, its preferable that you put these paths in your .login as a shellscript so they're static, that's it, that's all. And its well supported, nearly everyone is moving and using $XDG_CONFIG_HOME which is $HOME/.config instead of throwing their configuration files into $HOME/.MYPROGRAM FWIW I would love if Everyone just used $HOME/.local/$FHS that way everything is reused But then again a /tmp/usr/$USER or /var/cache/usr/ should also exist, nobody cares.
deleted 2y ago
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hnlmorg 2y ago

“should” is massively overstating things here. For starters, it’s not a UNIX thing. It’s really more a Linux thing. Some Unixes have also adopted it but not enough for someone to argue that someone “should” be using it in reply to an article about Unix more generally. Secondly, XDG stems from managing desktop applications. Granted there’s no reason it can’t nor shouldn’t be used for CLI tools too. But equally there isn’t any reason why someone needs to use it. And on headless platforms, it makes zero sense to enforce XDG over any other Unix standard. Lastly, XDG is surprising complicated. Your example of symlinks et al demonstrates just how much additional work you’re doing just to follow XDG here. If you CLI tool doesn’t spew dozens of config files in $HOME then your recommendation isn’t any better than the one in the article. I really want to like XDG but like many things that originated from Linux, it’s far from an elegant solution to a simple problem and barely supported outside of Linux too. So I can’t blame anyone for deciding not to bother with it for their own personal software on their personal systems.

nmz 2y ago
For starters, It's not really a linux thing, Xorg runs everywhere, from BSDs to even windows. Secondly, XDG is a much better standard than FHS and actually supports normal users, needing to be root to install a random application is a security vulnerability waiting to happen. Lastly XDG is not complicated at all. its around 10 envvars pointing to directories that you have to mkdir, its preferable that you put these paths in your .login as a shellscript so they're static, that's it, that's all. And its well supported, nearly everyone is moving and using $XDG_CONFIG_HOME which is $HOME/.config instead of throwing their configuration files into $HOME/.MYPROGRAM FWIW I would love if Everyone just used $HOME/.local/$FHS that way everything is reused But then again a /tmp/usr/$USER or /var/cache/usr/ should also exist, nobody cares.

deleted 2y ago

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