Desktop OSs are the worst for mixing random system files with the users own documents. Theres a better balance now where the “Files” app has your documents, downloaded stuff and similar, while system and app data is hidden.
Isn't that pretty much just Windows? That basically never occurs on Linux and it's not common on macOS, either. All the garbage I have on my work computer (a Mac) in ~/Documents is stuff that OneDrive synced over from when I used to have a Windows computer there. (If I could turn the OneDrive feature that takes over ~/Documents and ~/Downloads, I would.)
Linux software is notorious for spewing crap all over the user's home directory. Delete everything inside your /home/name and see how well the system still works. On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs can store their internal system files without requiring root other than mixed in with the user Home.
> I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs can store their internal system files without requiring root other than mixed in with the user Home.
You are right. I see a lot of applications putting stuff into /var/run/user/<uid>/, but this is mostly ephemeral runtime data, notably sockets. And of course systemd has service units there, which don't seem temporary at all, but it's systemd, so whatever... .
The correct way for what I intend would be /var/lib/user/<uid>/, but yes this does not exist on my host. But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home. It is definitely user-specific, under the control of the user, instead of the OS, and when you want to move your user to another host (or sync it), you definitely want to include that data as well, so putting it across the OS filesystem sounds kind of dirty to me.
I think the systemd units in /run are indeed ephemeral, and indicate units that are active. If they have permanent counterparts (some units, like transient timer units, don't have them), you'll find them under /etc/systemd or /lib/systemd for system units and ~/.local/share/systemd or ~/.config/systemd for user units.
> But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home
I think I agree— as long as the conventions are clear, I think it's reasonable to have some hidden dirs under $HOME set aside for configuration and cache and so on.
Maybe there's value in exposing a single directory as the root of a sandbox for user files, so users have to go farther out of their way to screw things up, especially depending on your audience. Maybe a decade from now Linux desktops will have something like this, because most apps will run sandboxed in Flatpak, unable to write to the root of $HOME. (Idrk how that's organized, though— maybe apps are just allowed to edit "their" dotfiles without modifying their location.)
But I'm not sure that obscuring configuration data's place in the filesystem in that way is really desirable or necessary. I doubt most users inspect or think about hidden directories on Unix-likes unless they're looking for them anyway.
The average user does not see things like app config files, cache data, etc as their own files. The current /home has so much absolute junk that it's easy to not know where your stuff is. "Real" files to a normal user are .docx, photos, downloaded files, etc. Not auto generated configs.
There ideally should be some separation between your actual documents and system utility stuff. I guess this has mostly happen already with real files sitting in cloud storage. With local storage just being replacable.
> The average user does not see things like app config files, cache data, etc as their own files.
All the more reason to put this stuff into the user directory, so that it is automatically included in backups and syncs done by the unaware user.
> The current /home has so much absolute junk that it's easy to not know where your stuff is.
Not my experience. Application data of application XYZ is either in ~/.xyz or in ~/.{config,local,cache}/xyz, depending on whether the application is FHS compliant or not.
Yes and no. Some older conventions for dotfiles are a bit messy in that they're not necessarily contained under top-level directories like ~/.config or ~/.local, but the hijacking of non-hidden directories for contents unrelated to their purposes, like using ~/Documents for game saves, is basically unheard of (except for some ports of Windows games that retain this bad habit).
> On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
That is, frankly, a ridiculous test for the issue under discussion. Even if everything was stored under a top-level subdirectory set aside for application data in a perfectly orderly way, nuking $HOME would still break things.
Besides all that, hidden directories in the root of ~ are conventional¹ places to store application config files and so on, and can't be mistaken for conventional places to store documents. On most Linux-based operating systems, the conventional place to store documents is (obviously) ~/Documents, which is created ahead of time for all users. That folder doesn't generally end up polluted with things that aren't documents.
> On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
If you delete /var/mobile or any of the things that $HOME points to in the context of some app, you'll definitely lose app settings.
The app sandboxing on iOS does something nice by sort of forcing app configuration data to live within conventional directories, but none of that is captured in the "what if you delete ~" test. (The fact that $HOME isn't really directly exposed to the user sort of does; the local files you're comparing to $HOME on Linux are actually $HOME/Media on iOS.)
