A leftist entering their middle age and becoming more punk with every year

  • 102 Posts
  • 144 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • 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

  • 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.

    🙄