this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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Honestly I say just let the user decide what goes in their home directory. I always get annoyed at all the random garbage in there. There should be a specific place that is user owned that isn't filled with cruft and configuration files
Yeah, I have essentially never used these folders unless a program sticks something there by default (mostly pictures).
I just save everything to ~/Desktop anyway.
A thing I started doing years ago, to combat trashing to ~/Desktop or ~/Downloads:
Set /tmp as your default download directory.
At least for me, almost everything I download is just ephemeral and would collect dust
Putting it there causes it to be cleaned up on the next reboot. No more piles of junk on the desktop (the virtual one at least. Don't ask about my physical desktop)
That's a good idea until you download a 10GB file and you wonder why you're out of RAM :P
I use /tmp as a temp folder for yt-dlp (it is faster than an HDD when adding metadata and subs to the video), and I've ran out of RAM before by downloading a video too big... Silly me, my laptop only has 8GB.
True, but only if you use ramfs for tmp, which not all distros do
If you don't, then it's not going to be cleaned up on reboot.
I don't have it as ramfs and it gets cleaned up perfectly fine. never had a system where it doesn't
I relocated the default folders that are useful to another drive, I pretty much don't use the home folder at all apart from some random github pulls or some shit
The user does decide, XDG user directories are optional and configurable. Since they are already established, user-friendly distros / desktop environments already pre-install them.
And what speaks against just using a new directory within your home directory as your "specific place that is user owned that isn't filed with cruft and configuration files"?
It's only optional and configurable if it's respected. Which often times it's not due to convention.
And I do already actually, it's just weird that I have to.
It's 100% one of those carry overs from earlier days of computing and Linux not having great standards only great conventions. Like /bin vs /usr/bin
Could you elaborate how the configuration might not be respected? Do you mean that you've often encountered applications that save files to hard-coded paths and do not even let you change the destination path?
If you ask me, that's just bad software design. If the software is open-source, there is the option to request the developers to read the actual path of the respective well know directory from the XDG environment variables or allow configuration.