Developers: "Yes, the users love cluttered homes, just put everything there and ignore guidelines"

fun fact: that dotfiles are hidden on *nix systems was just a bug in the first version of ls (the dev originally only wanted to hide the "." and ".." entry and not every file starting with .), but before the 2nd version could roll around, people have already deemed it a usefull feature so it was never changed.
- That's neat!

The nice thing about Free software is that distros can fix these programs that store things in the wrong location. My Debian home is a lot cleaner than my Arch.

Man: project zomboid just creates a "Zomboid" folder in home, not even with a leading dot.
- whispers Zombocom

Amazed that no one can figure out a .config/ or .local/ already
Sure, AppData exists, but do you expect them to... read?

I realize that the OP is a Windows case, but I'd be rich if I had a penny for every time a savegame or config file is stored somewhere totally whack.
- I'd be rich if I had a penny for every time a savegame or config file is stored somewhere totally whack.
  Fun thing of you enable protected folders on windows: No app can get write access your Documents folder (or Images or Videos or...) unless you put them explicitly on the whitelist. That means you get to experience all the programs that are crashing or hanging or... just because they're simply assuming that that's the best place to dump data and because these folders always exist, you don't need proper error handling in case you cannot access them...
  
  Once Microaoft/Windows blocked access to the Root path of one of my drives.
  That was surprising.
- I'm completely self-taught when it comes to Linux, so I have some obvious gaps in my knowledge. I've looked for good write-ups on how Linux folders are intended for use and been unable to find a good resource. Thank you for sharing the official standard name. Reading up on it now.
  
  That's respectable! But yeah, the FHS is something that's surprisingly hard to find in-depth information about if you don't already know about it.
  I think this page from systemd (or this page from the arch wiki, if you prefer formatting) has a decent description of not only the FHS, but also the more standard user/home structures.
  
  You might find the XDG base directory standard interesting also, solves the problem the meme is about.
- I gave up using the default documents folder because a lot of game developers think that is a good place to store the saves

- on modern systems bin, sbin, lib, and lib64 are just symlinks to their respective /usr/* counterparts
  
  You can see the symlinks in the FHS picture
- Why does Redhat auto mount my extra hard drives at /run/media but Debian & Co put it in /media/?
  hmmmm? Exactly. 9/11 was an inside job.
- is it just me or these look a bit arbitrary
  and id love to understand the logic behind whats inside /home cause it seems way too chaotic to me
  
  The FHS is a real thing, the second picture is some indian techblog nonsense. ”Unix System Resources” lmao.

Everyone here is talking about conventions used on Linux, but this looks like Windows Explorer to me...?
Why are there so many directory names in there following Linux "hidden file" conventions, if that's the case?
- If you write cross-platform software, the easiest solution is usually to pretend everything's Unix. You'll hit some problems (e.g. assuming all filesystem APIs always use UTF-8 will bite you on Windows, which switched to UCS2 before UTF-8 or UTF-16 were invented, so now uses UTF-16 for Unicode-aware functions as that's the one that's ABI compatible with UCS2, and passing UTF-8 to the eight-bit-char functions requires you to opt into that mode explicitly), but mostly everything will just work. There's no XDG_CONFIG telling you to put these files anywhere in particular, as Windows is Windows, so most things use ~ as a fallback, which Windows knows to treat as %USERPROFILE%.
  
  Lots of frameworks for applications and games have automatic translation of file paths to sensible directories, but when you're writing software you're probably doing shit fast and dirty until it's ready for release, by that time you now have a bunch of people relying on your software so changing the file structure will cause loads of issues.
- Because developers use cross-compilable languages to pump out Windows executables without knowing or understanding or caring about the Windows environment. I mean, ~/.whatever still works under Windows.
- This is not a Linux or Windows thing. It's a lazy developer thing. It's also another one of the ways that some devs will coddle the end-user because "learning a file directory system is hard."
  
  I'm pretty sure the .file notation is a bug-turned-feature of a GNU coreutils program, Windows has no such thing and marks files as hidden using filesystem attributes.
  I couldn't say whether I prefer it one way or the other, but the dot prefix does stick out like a sore thumb on systems that don't hide them by default... though I think AnyOldName3's explaination makes sense.
  
  for someone regularly using both: it is a convenience feature.
  that way i just know config files are under ~/.myApp. if windows devs would beore consistent, i would be ok with %APPDATA%\myApp. however, too often it is under %APPDATA%\..\Roaming\myApp - which is just a pain. so i prefere linux style on windows.
  edit: copy paste error

don't do ls -la at your home directory

Don't forget about good ol .minecraft
- At least it's in %appdata%, and not in %userprofile%.

Nobody wants to develop a tag-based filesystem?
- It's basically in use today. Apparently younger generations are more used to searching for files rather than structuring them. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
- Developing it would be way above my skills but I've been fantasising about it for a long time. https://lemmy.world/comment/14344097
  
  Same. I think it would be more friendly for end-users too.
- What would that be?
- Bring back WinFS.

Is there an easy to find style guide of how Windows would like you to use these things, cause I never found one.
Appdata, my documents, program files... Everyone seems to be all over the place
- I believe the intent is to use appdata for user-specific configs and programdata for system-wide configs.
  
  A lot of apps mess up local vs roaming AppData too. Roaming is for things that would make sense in a roaming profile (ie to sync to other systems) whereas local is for things that should only exist on this system (caches, machine-specific configs, etc)
- Program files require admin
  Appdata doesn’t
  Documents doesn’t either but in theory it’s for files you want the user to edit or backup

They are using windows wrong, put everything on the desktop and don't worry about all those scary files everywhere else.
/S

Are dotfiles a thing on Windows? It's been a while since I used it.
- No. Hiding files is still just an attribute.
  Actually, technically, it's two. Files marked as system files are treated as hidden as well...
  
  With the downside that files marked as hidden on windows generally can't be read by tools and scripts in the way you expect it.
- They are in subfolders of C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming or \Local or \LocalLow.
  Or in the program's installation path in C:\Program Files or \Program Files(x86).
  Or in a separate directory directly under C:\
  Or the settings are handled via Registry keys.
  Or whatever the fuck Microsoft Store apps do.
  Or any combination of the above.
  
  Hey, don't forget about C:\ProgramData !
  
  I remember that much lol. I should have clarified, I was trying to ask why are there dotfiles in the screenshot

The guidelines for Windows developers kinda suck tbh. Maybe it's better these days, but plenty of weird legacy software behaviour can be blamed on MSDN.

.android is either from the Android SDK, or possibly Android Studio so blame either Google or IntelliJ. .vscode is Visual Studio Code which is made by Microsoft so your guess is as good as mine on that one. .eclipse is Eclipse and is a Java IDE approximately the age of dirt and might actually pre-date the AppData folder existing. .ssh is OpenSSH and has been around long enough on the nix side of things that it might pre-date both AppData and the XDG folder conventions. Not sure about most of the rest.

I hate it. I think a lot of devs who write cross-platform open-source software just use the %userprofile% automatic env variable to dump dotfiles in Windows since it can basically directly replace $HOME. In my opinion using something like %localappdata% is definitely preferred.

This is why i never use the default folders, I will always make my own elsewhere.

If you’re on a Windows box, the apps you’re calling out are assuming some level of FHS or XDG compatibility, neither of which are Windows things.
If you’re on a mac, macOS uses its own thing but can play well with dotdirs. However, you’ll find a mix of assuming XDG and weird macOS storage locations depending on how the tool determines storage location priority.
If you’re on Linux, there are too many standards.
- Though, XDG says you need a .config/|.local/... fallback, if the variables are not set.

Files and directories starting with a dot are hiden by default. You are aksing for this stuff if you manually unhide them.
- Screenshot is from Windows where dotfiles aren't hidden by default. And all the lazy developers that created those directories, didn't bother to set the hidden attribute (See appdata is greyed, because it has the hidden attribute set)
  
  To be fair, those Windows directories might have a space in them and break things anyway.
- There are a million reasons to access those folders. There are 0 reasons to leave them hidden.
  
  only if you are a power user. for most people its just clutter in the way of the files they are looking for.

AFAIK appdata are stored in ~/.local/share, but you don't even have that folder!?!?!
It's not the Linux convention that's fucked up in this regard, but your system.
If you want it stored in ~/AppData, you need to make a link to it from ~/.local/share.
I'm no expert, so there may be other ways to do it. but apparently your system doesn't follow conventions.
- He's using Windows
  
  WHAT? So he chose an OS that doesn't follow Linux standard on PURPOSE?!?! That doesn't make much sense. 😋
- I even have a couple of things that found ~/.local but missed /share
- He's using windows.
  But while we're on the subject, ~/.local/share is cancer and shouldn't exist.
  The appropriate path is /usr/share.
  EDIT: Okay to be clear I mean that anything that could be global should go into /usr/share and massively save on space and effort if another user needs the same stuff.
  Anything that doesn't need to be global doesn't need to go into /use/share but somewhere else in ~/.
  The way it is now my ~/.local is a massive dumping ground of crap from configs to static app resources that should go into /usr/share to entire applications with snap or flatpak (why I don't use them) to random config files.
  It's just a nasty mess on my home partition when it in most cases really doesn't need to be.
  Users below rightfully pointed out many exceptions like venvs and while I still believe there should be a more correct place for them to go e.g. (~/.venv, ~/.flatpak), but obviously they shouldn't go into /usr/share willy-nilly.
  I have removed the sass below because I should've been more comprehensive in my criticism before ad-hominem.
  
  The appropriate path is /usr/share.
  That's a global folder, and not proper for storing "per user" data.
  
  /usr/share? How is a random app getting write permissions to that?
  
  I'm a little confused by that statement. Where should locally installed (non-sudo) applications, such as virtual python envs who are accessed by multiple other not-necessarily-python apps or perhaps baloo, flatpak, etc, store their shared data? I'm rather convinced that giving all users write access to /usr/share is a terrible idea.
  
  I have a SystemD service
  The irony is how lennart and his cancer approached standards, top to bottom.
  Now I want McRibs.

- True on linux, but not on Windows. There is the "Appdata" (Application Data) sub folder for that. The users profile is meant for the users personal files - but way too many apps ignore that.
  Makes me think that probably a multiplatform-compat library points the apps there?
  
  No, not true on Linux. We have the XDG folder specifications to specifically not have our ~ cluttered with random shit.
  Doing this on Linux is no better than doing it on Windows.

I mean... those are hidden by default
- That doesn’t make it better though. App data should be under app data, either roaming or local depending on use.
- To be fair this is how I clean as well
- still. it's the year 2025. XDG_CONFIG should be the standard assumption
- Who actually keeps hidden folders hidden? It's like the first box I check when I open a file explorer for the first time.
- I don't think so. If they were, they'd look shaded like the AppData folder does.
  
  They have a dot in front. Means they are not shown my default, not even in cli

It's frustrating when apps apply Linux-specific behavior to other platforms. No windows apps should be just throwing hidden folders into the user directory!
- I began using SMPlayer, which uses MPV, and yeah, it was confusing having to mess around in %localappdata%. But unironically, having to do so kinda prepared me for the switch to linux, what with getting used to using the filesystem.