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dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Shout out to xdg-ninja - it’ll find files that are in your home and suggest how to configure the app to use XDG instead. github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

sparr ,

Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that. Time to add a few hundred lines to my dotfiles :)

PureTryOut ,
@PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social avatar

Strange that some apps allow configuring it rather than just doing it automatically…

Lifter ,

That’s the usual open source way. The config probably came later so they just added the option without changing the default because that would break backward compatibility.

And there would be too much boring work to build a migration.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

After running it and properly configure the paths I once again came to the conclusion: I fucking hate Google.

dinckelman ,

Golang puts shit specifically in $HOME/go. Not even .go. Just plain go.

Why is it so difficult to follow industry standards

Laser ,

That’s what happens when you don’t set $GOPATH I think

fmstrat ,

That doesn’t make it better.

Laser ,

It makes it insofar better to me that you have the option to change it. You can’t change Mozilla programs to use anything but .mozilla (apart from modifying the source code of course) so for me seeing the folder is at least a way of telling me that the variable is unset.

The better question is which folder is suited the best to store the stuff that goes into $GOPATH

fmstrat ,

Just because something is worse, doesn’t make the other thing good. A sane and standard default, as others have mentioned, is a small bar to meet.

dinckelman ,

Of course, but that’s not the point. There should be a sane default, and there isn’t one

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    WolfLink ,

    What I want in $HOME are the following directories:

    If I’m on a GUI-based environment:

    • Desktop
    • Documents
    • Downloads

    In general:

    • .local
    • my_junk_folder_i_made

    I’d like everything else to live within something like ~/.local thanks

    dan ,
    @dan@upvote.au avatar

    Maybe Linux should have .local and .roaming folders like Windows (local = only useful on this system, roaming = can sync across systems). Config would be in .roaming if it’s not machine-specific.

    luciferofastora ,

    Does ~/.config fit the bill for the second one?

    dan , (edited )
    @dan@upvote.au avatar

    There’s some stuff in~/.config that’s specific to the computer. KDE is a good example - a lot of KDE apps mix config and state in the same file. There’s some solutions for syncing these files, like github.com/VorpalBlade/chezmoi_modify_manager which is an addon to Chezmoi that can exclude particular keys when storing an INI-style config file in Git.

    I’m sure there’s some config files in there that are entirely specific to the computer. Things like the Wayland per-monitor scaling settings are in there somewhere I think.

    There’s also things like data files that you may want to keep in sync across machines. They’re not really configs.

    rotopenguin ,
    @rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

    The only practical difference between Local and Roaming and LocalLow is that developers randomly pick one and dump your game saves in there.

    jollyrogue ,

    There is a .local folder these days.

    Profile roaming hasn’t been solved aside from NFS mounts. I guess Syncthing might work.

    dan ,
    @dan@upvote.au avatar

    I know .local exists - My comment was more about .roaming which would be nice to exist, but doesn’t currently exist.

    Profile roaming hasn’t been solved aside from NFS mounts. I guess Syncthing might work.

    I’m using Chezmoi to sync some dotfiles, scripts, etc. to a Git repo and that seems to work well enough for me. I’m not syncing much yet, though.

    eager_eagle ,
    @eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

    off the shelf go was too annoying for me

    Nowadays I set GOENV_ROOT to an XDG location and use goenv instead.

    atzanteol ,

    Go pisses me off with that. I separate projects the way I want but go wants every project written in go in one big directory?

    dinckelman ,

    I really didn’t like this either. It’s quite surprising, because the rest of Go tooling is quite nice. Not having a venv, or at least something like pnpm-style node_modules is weird

    jollyrogue ,

    Why would go have a virtual environment or dep tree like node_modules equivalent, it’s not interpreted or dynamically linked.

    With modules, dependencies can be vendored.

    dinckelman ,

    Obviously it’s not, but you have to download all this shit somewhere before compilation. That’s the whole point

    turkalino ,
    @turkalino@lemmy.yachts avatar

    Google

    following industry standards

    pick one

    mcepl ,
    @mcepl@lemmy.world avatar

    This post literally links to the leading one.

    umbrella ,
    @umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

    yes please!

    Thcdenton ,

    YOU’RE NOT MY MOM I’LL DO WHAT I WANT

    Mechanize ,

    I wish they used them all, especially XDG_CACHE_HOME which can become pretty big pretty fast.

    MonkderDritte ,

    And i wish there was a separate XDG_LOG_HOME or $HOME/.local/log, with logrotate preconfigured to look there.

    jollyrogue ,

    Or $HOME/.var/log.

    Samueru ,

    Shameless flex

    https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/e69dded6-8682-49ba-8bc3-825b2cdbbf67.png

    Xylight ,
    @Xylight@lemm.ee avatar

    I regret checking this

    https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/05632732-7b05-4feb-9487-c1cb430c9d03.png

    dizzy ,
    @dizzy@lemmy.ml avatar

    Whoa I’m a stickler for getting as much as I can out but even I have .zshenv and some other too hard to figure out things in there. How’d you manage a total wipeout?

    Samueru , (edited )

    zsh is actually easy and it is detailed in the archwiki

    You have to set $ZDOTDIR in /etc/zsh/zshenv and iirc that was the only location that required root to edit.

    For the rest of stuff, here is how I fix steam for example and you can check the rest of my dotfiles for how I configured zsh and all of that.

    Although I haven’t updated them, I still had a .local directory back then, it was 1 week ago that I changed .local for Local and that let to an issue with distrobox which I made a PR fixing it that’s still open though.

    dizzy ,
    @dizzy@lemmy.ml avatar

    That’s awesome!

    laurelraven ,

    This is probably a dumb question, but what program is that?

    twei ,

    Looks like thunar (default file manager on xfce)

    Samueru ,

    thunar (and the smaller window is the xfce4-terminal).

    njordomir ,

    Lol, the minimalist window decoration had me thinking you were running a terminal inside of the home directory of your file manager. :D

    I’ve seen weirder things.

    laurelraven ,

    Honestly, that’s what I thought too, and wanted to check that out

    tabular , (edited )
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    ls Volatile

    Samueru ,

    It’s empty lol, it’s a directory on tmpfs that i use to build programs and similar stuff to not be hammering my ssd with unnecessary writes.

    I have $XDG_CACHE_HOME in tmp as well and I moved the mesa sharer caches to $XDG_STATE_HOME as that’s really the only thing so far I’ve needed to preserve.

    tabular ,
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    tmpfs (…) to build programs (…) to not be hammering my ssd with unnecessary writes

    Sounds useful. How did you setup the directory?

    Running df tells me “tmpfs” is mounted on /run. If I build in that that directory then would it be stored in RAM, or do I need to do something else?

    Samueru ,

    I have /tmp in my fstab with these mount options.

    tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,noatime,size=20G 0 0

    And the rest of the setup is done in my zprofile

    tabular ,
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    I think I should be able to get this working following your zprofile file. Thanks!

    drwho ,
    @drwho@beehaw.org avatar

    BRB, putting in a PR to make /etc mode 1777 by default.

    walthervonstolzing ,
    @walthervonstolzing@lemmy.ml avatar

    vim now has an option to put the .vim folder in ~/.config; though I’m not sure if the default plugin/package & syntax folders can be set under ~/.local/share.

    PlexSheep ,

    You can also just use neovim instead, among other improvements, it’s configs are in the xdg dirs

    aard ,
    @aard@kyu.de avatar

    Probably half the entries in that list are not GUI apps, and XDG doesn’t apply (though some still support it). For some others there (like emacs) XDG is used if it exists.

    eager_eagle ,
    @eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

    XDG doesn’t apply for CLI apps? About half of dirs I still have cluttering my home are GUI apps whose devs refuse to follow the specification, while I see less friction from CLI/TUI devs, since they’re the ones actually seeing these hidden locations.

    sparr ,

    What makes you think XDG doesn’t apply to non GUI apps?

    aard ,
    @aard@kyu.de avatar

    It’s already in the name - XDG stands for X Desktop Group (nowadays freedesktop), which works on interoperability for desktop environments. In a pure shell environment (or even if you’re not running a full desktop) none of the XDG variables are defined, and especially in shell environments the default fallbacks specified by XDG are not necessarily what the operator would expect.

    sparr ,

    That name is decades old. XDG stands for “Cross Desktop Group”.

    A “pure” X environment (e.g. startx xterm) also doesn’t define those variables, but many desktop environments do, just like many shell configurations do.

    GolfNovemberUniform ,
    @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

    But what’s the difference? It’ll be in /home anyways and I heard BSD had some issues with something that could be XDG.

    mrvictory1 ,

    Better organization and backup / restore. For example if you want to restore config files but don’t want to move over the large “.local” folder, applications that write to $HOME will create diifculty.

    dotslashme ,

    For me personally I just hate that I do not know where to find configs, especially when using a dotfiles repo, it becomes harder than if they’re all available under a common path.

    just_another_person ,

    Because, like /etc, you know there is a designated place for config files. It’s already set for you right there, and there is a standard for it.

    mosiacmango , (edited )

    /etc is a standard, defined in the filesystem hierarchy standard. This is not:

    freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, but we are not an official standards body. There is no requirement for projects to implement all of these specifications, nor certification.

    Below are some of the specifications we have produced, many under the banner of ‘XDG’, which stands for the Cross-Desktop Group.

    Its nit-picking, but this is a specification, i.e a preference, not an official standard. It would be great if everyone would agree on just one of these to use, but that isn’t a foregone conclusion. Even the actual standard, the FHS, isn’t followed by popular OS’s like NixOS.

    just_another_person ,

    Specification, WHATEVER 🙄

    The point is it exists for a reason, and clear purpose.

    mosiacmango ,

    All specificatiins exist for a reason, and they all have a clear purpose.

    What happens when you have 15 that are different and all overlap? When any of 15 is “right?”

    Feathercrown ,

    I’ve only ever heard of FHS or XDG. Due to the free nature of linux distros, there is no central authority on how they are to be set up, and so there is no difference between those two options in terms of authority. Standards (which XDG is, colloquially) are followed based on popularity.

    mosiacmango ,

    Yeah, I fully get that. The post and comments were very specific about how if you dont follow XDG, you’re fucking up, while only generally saying that “everything would be better if everyone followed the same standard.”

    I pointed out that there are several standards and asked for a unique reason why XDG was the best to use.

    I still haven’t heard one, which is fine, but it undermines the “If youre not using, XDG youre a idiot” tone of the post and comments.

    Feathercrown ,

    I think the logic is that it’s the most used, so to avoid seriously competing standards, it’s better to stick with it.

    mosiacmango , (edited )

    So far, thats the most specific reason someone has given to use XDG, but I dont think it accurate.

    FHS is the most used, as it’s been the primary linux filesystem standard for decades. Isn’t it better to stick with it if the only metric is popularity?

    Feathercrown ,

    I thought XDG-aware apps fell back to FHS if no XDG vars were set? Or do they not do that

    GolfNovemberUniform ,
    @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

    /etc can’t be edited on immutable distros and usually apps store the editable config in /home/config and make the /etc one kind of read-only.

    bsergay , (edited )

    /etc can’t be edited on immutable distros

    False on at least Fedora Atomic^[1]^, NixOS^[2]^ and openSUSE Aeon^[3]^…

    Which ‘immutable’ distros are you referring to?

    1. On Fedora Atomic, changing /etc is literally identical to how it goes any other distro; or at least 1-to-1 as on traditional Fedora. The bonus is that a pristine copy of the original /etc is kept inside a sub-directory of /usr. Furthermore, all changes compared to the pristine copy are kept track of.
    2. On NixOS, changes have to be applied through configuration.nix. Though, regardless, it’s effectively possible to edit and populate /etc like it is on other distros.
    3. It’s explicitly mentioned that /etc does not belong to the immutable base.
    GolfNovemberUniform ,
    @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

    Fedora Atomic allowed it recently afaik. I’m always forgetting this. And NixOS is not immutable because of R/W FS.

    bsergay ,

    No sorry, Fedora Atomic has allowed changes to /etc since at least 2019. Regarding NixOS, the consensus is that it’s an immutable distro. The immutability of /nix/store/ suffices for this.

    Your notion on Fedora Atomic was false. So, what other ‘immutable’ distro did you have in mind when making that comment?

    GolfNovemberUniform ,
    @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

    Please stop harassing me. And idk. I saw that issue but at this point I think it was just misinformation.

    bsergay ,

    Thank you for your honesty! I only intend for the truth to prevail and/or to reach mutual understanding. So please don’t feel attacked. If somehow I came off as such, my apologies; that has never been my intent.

    MonkderDritte ,

    In this case it would be XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/config. That simple.

    SmokeInFog ,
    @SmokeInFog@midwest.social avatar

    But what’s the difference?

    I can only imagine someone asking this if they a) don’t use the terminal except if Stackexchange says they should and b) have yet to try and cleanup a system that’s acquired cruft over a few years. If you don’t care about it, then let me flip that around and ask why you care if people use XDG? The people who care about it are the people in the spaces that concern it.

    Off the top of my head this matters because:

    • it’s less clutter, especially if you’re browsing your system from terminal
    • it’s a single, specified place for user specific configs, session cache, application assets, etc. Why wouldn’t such important foundational things required for running apps not be in a well defined specification? Why just dump it gracelessly in the user’s root folder outside of pure sloppy laziness?
    • it makes uninstalling apps easier
    • it makes maintenance easier
    • it makes installing on new machines easier

    It’ll be in /home anyways and I heard BSD had some issues with something that could be XDG.

    🙄

    mosiacmango , (edited )

    Someone asking a question doesnt merit the insult of saying they “would never ask if they used a terminal.” I have no particular dog in this fight, but not being a dick isn’t that hard.

    As to using this standard, just because this is your preferred standard, doesnt mean its the only standard.

    It may actually be the best now, but so were the 14 others that came before it. Your stated reasons are the same reasons as everyone agreeing to use any other standard. Consistency, predictability, automation,ease of backup/restore, etc.

    What sets this standard apart from all the rest? Based on their own description, they aren’t even an official standard, just one in “very active” use.

    So why this, specifically? Just because its what you’re already doing?

    SmokeInFog ,
    @SmokeInFog@midwest.social avatar

    Someone asking a question doesnt merit the insult of saying they “would never ask if they used a terminal.” I have no particular dog in this fight, but not being a dick isn’t that hard.

    This is true, and something that I’m working on. For some reason my brain is uncharitable in these situations and I interpret it not as a simple question but a sarcastically hostile put down in the form of a question. In this case, “Why would you be dumb and not just put things in /home”. That really is a silly interpretation of the OP question, so I apologize.

    As to using this standard, just because this is your preferred standard, doesnt mean its the only standard.

    Sure, but the OP was essentially asking “Why isn’t dumping everything into a user’s /home the standard? Why are you advocating for something different?”

    Based on their own description, they aren’t even an official standard, just one in “very active” use.

    There are a LOT of “unofficial standards” that are very impactful. System D can be considered among those. The page you link to does talk about a lot of specifications, but it also says that a lot of them are already under the XDG specification or the reason for XDG is to bring such a scheme under a single specification, i.e. XDG.

    So why this, specifically? Just because its what you’re already doing?

    • yes I do use it, so I am definitely biased in that regard
    • it bring a bunch of disparate mostly abandoned specification into a single, active one
    • it’s the active specification that has learned from past attempts
    TrickDacy ,
    @TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

    Weird to me that you apparently think the only way of viewing files is in a terminal

    SmokeInFog ,
    @SmokeInFog@midwest.social avatar

    It’s weird to me that you think I think that. I do primarily browse files by terminal, but not always. Before I got into heavy terminal use I was a power user of Nemo. In any case, dumping everything in /home does not make for a better gui file browsing experience, either

    TrickDacy ,
    @TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

    The implication seemed to be “if you don’t care exactly where all your files are you must not use terminal”. Which I still don’t get. Just about anyone who would even be in a community like this uses terminal a lot anyway.

    lolcatnip ,

    To give one example, what if someone wants to have more than one set of options for the same app? That’s something I’ve needed before, and it’s really hard to accomplish if the app always looks in one specific place for its options.

    GolfNovemberUniform ,
    @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

    Oh so it makes it impossible to change config path? Yea that’s a bit inconvenient but you always can just make many files and replace the file in the right directory with the one you want.

    lolcatnip ,

    Not if you want to use both at the same time. Due example, I’ve wanted to have a local Gnome session that I leave signed in, and another session with different settings that I remote into.

    Wispy2891 ,

    100% agree and I also despise devs who do this on windows, instead of using %appdata% they’re using c:\users\username.myappisimportantandtotallydeservesthisdir

    Tlaloc_Temporal ,
    @Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca avatar

    To be fair here, appdata is technically a hidden folder and there are lots of reasons an app would want it’s data accessable by the user.

    Wispy2891 ,

    Yes but then just spam the documents folder like anyone else, don’t hoard the home root for no reason except that is a lazy cross platform port

    lockhart ,

    I have to use a separate Documents folder for my actual documents lol

    conorab ,

    I think that also causes issues for roaming profiles and folder redirection. If roaming is turned on then everything in the %appdata%\roaming folder is synced to a server. %AppData%\Local is not. So if your app is using %AppData%\Roaming for temporary data then you are causing a whole bunch on unnecessary IO. Same for using Documents since that if often synced.

    xan1242 ,

    Not to mention - this isn’t necessarily the correct place for Windows anyway. That is exactly why they standardized stuff around Vista.

    Plus - what about apps that store an ungodly amount data in there? Personally, I only keep the OS and basic app data (such as configs and cache) on the partition and nothing else.

    Then something like Minecraft comes along and it’s like “humpty dumpty I’m crapping a lumpty” and stores all its data in “.minecraft” right there in your user directory.

    Then you gotta symlink stuff around and it becomes a mess…

    refalo ,

    Whatever happened to Linux being all about choice? Do you want that or not?

    xkcd.com/927

    Telorand ,

    You can choose any home directory you want, as long as it’s XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

    hallettj ,
    @hallettj@leminal.space avatar

    Are there other relevant standards? The XDG base directory specification has been around for a long time, and is well established.

    Maybe your comment wooshed over my head; if so I apologize.

    refalo ,

    having choices are the opposite of conforming to standards

    Deckweiss ,

    Well, when software supports this standard, you as a user have a way to not confirm to it by setting the env variables to whatever you want, even per app. So you have two choises, either use it as is or change it.

    But if software doesn’t supportthe spec, there is no choise of using it. So ons choise less.

    tabular ,
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    To conform to a standard or do something else are each a choice. If you can justify your choice then perhaps it’s a good one.

    refalo ,

    Choosing to not conform is also a choice

    tabular ,
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    Of course, and is what I say.

    MonkderDritte ,

    This standard makes your software’s paths user-configurable, giving users a choice.

    refalo ,

    And if I don’t agree with how that standard is implemented? I should have the choice to use something else. Isn’t that how everything works?

    atzanteol ,

    This is the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard.

    MonkderDritte ,

    You can of course not give users a choice. And a lot of applications do their own thing, having their own variables like GOPATH or a cli option like –config or some way to do that in a config file like Idea IDEs. But implementing XDG from start is miles simpler for all parties, it’s good practice to have your paths and variables somewhat organized in code anyway.

    avidamoeba ,
    @avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

    My fellow FOSS users, patches are welcome.

    dohpaz42 ,
    @dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

    Here is a more concise way to achieve the same thing:

    
<span style="color:#323232;">ls -ACd ~/.</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">??*</span><span style="color:#323232;">/ </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">| </span><span style="color:#323232;">sed -e </span><span style="color:#183691;">"s#$</span><span style="color:#323232;">HOME</span><span style="color:#183691;">/##g"
</span>
    palordrolap ,

    I think that can be boiled down to only cd; echo .*/

    Maybe throw a ;cd - on the end if the change of directory is unwanted.

    ComicSads ,

    if you need to preserve cd - you might be able to do this with pushd and popd

    Samueru ,

    ls -A | grep “^.”

    https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/e8da5656-b741-48f4-9488-be7cc83c9159.png

    I had to make a dummy .dotfile to test because I don’t have hidden files in my home.

    sfera ,

    Are there abstractions available around the XDG specifications to resolve the proper paths?

    dan ,
    @dan@upvote.au avatar

    Use the environment variables.

    sfera ,

    I do. But you might have misunderstood my question. I was not asking for assistance. I was just curious if there are libraries available which allow easy adoption of the XDG specification. I imagine that such abstractions would be useful for multi-platform software and generally to lower the bar for adoption.

    dan ,
    @dan@upvote.au avatar

    Depends on the programming language. In C# for example, there’s an API to get special folder paths that works in all supported environments (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and I think iOS too). On Linux, it includes fallbacks in case the environment variables aren’t set.

    MonkderDritte ,

    What language? Python has PyXDG.

    In shell it’s simply

    
<span style="color:#323232;">XDG_DATA_HOME="${XDG_DATA_HOME:-"$HOME"/.local/share}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">XDG_CONFIG_HOME="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-"$HOME"/.config}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">etc.
</span>
    sfera ,

    Thanks, I did not know about PyXDG. That was the type of thing I was asking about.

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