[DaiPlusPlus]

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.

[pezezin]

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]

I'd have thought you could easily enable some fs-jail that maps any-and-every request matching /~/..+/i wherever you want?

[pezezin]

I had never heard of it. Maybe it is possible, but I am too lazy to try it...

[winterplace]

Do you have a link to documentation for that?

[pimlottc]

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-...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedesktop.org

[demondemidi]

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

[DaiPlusPlus]

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]

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]

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.