[Avamander]

There are multiple reasons for this.

One being that it's _my_ $HOME, not some random developers'. I literally had more than 50 different dotfiles and dotfolders in my $HOME at some point. It was a garbage dump and I couldn't even identify the culprit with some of them. Simply disrespectful.

Then there's the issue of cleaning up leftovers and stale cache files. It shouldn't take a custom script cleaning up after every special snowflake that decided to use some arbitrarily-named directory in $HOME.

Not following the spec also makes backing up vital application state much much harder.

In the end, I made my $HOME not writeable so I could instantly find out if some software wants to take a dump. It turns out it's often simply unnecessary as well, the software doesn't even care, just prints an error and continues.

[akdev1l]

> It shouldn't take a custom script cleaning up after every special snowflake that decided to use some arbitrarily-named directory in $HOME.

Not to take away from your point but I shall introduce you to systemd-tmpfiles

no scripts needed, it can clean up for you if you keep a list of directories/files to clean up

[wpm]

> In the end, I made my $HOME not writeable so I could instantly find out if some software wants to take a dump

A brilliant idea, but goddamn what a shame it is that we have to do such things to keep our homes clean