To be fair, a lot of programs rely on those standard directories from the "Known Folders" specification - it would be hard to rip them out without breaking a l

To be fair, a lot of programs rely on those standard directories from the "Known Folders" specification - it would be hard to rip them out without breaking a lot of software. Even on linux it's hard to get away from these directories, as virtually every distro ships with xdg-user-dirs. Even if you use Arch, you'll probably install xdg-user-dirs with Gnome or KDE which creates those directories on login.