The Windows equivilent would be instead of putting application data in the AppData folder, it throws it in Documents, My Games, or just in the home folder directly.
Better, it could be literally anywhere and there's nothing you can do about it. Also symlinks practically look like regular folders and files to most apps.
That's why i prefer to use Wine for games. Just change the symlinks in C:/users/ to somewhere sane, like .local/Games//save. Guess you could also use the variables in .config/user-dirs.dirs while creating the prefix, but i haven't tested that yet.
There’s no game related dirs in your My Documents dir? Most don’t even use My Games they just dump directly into My Documents. I guarantee most game devs don’t understand the difference between local and roaming either. They just put shit randomly wherever they want
I have almost nothing in my home directory, no. Been applying this to clean it up even further. I want my chezmoi dotfiles repo to be clean. Especially not games' files since I run Steam through flatpak. It does put things in ~/.var but at least it's collected to one point.
Not really a problem of "Linux" or "Windows", but more of "developers".
Most software on Linux is configured to place their config files in ~/.config. Some others, like the ones in the pic, just dump them directly into your home folder.
Many applications have configuration files. Historically these files were placed in your home directory aka "on the floor". The variable mentioned defines a directory where these files should go. Many applications ignore this.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is an environment variable that programs can (and should) read to determine the location for storing dotfiles (config files, kind of). Not reading (or caring about) the environment variable, and not adhering to the default of /home/username/.config/ results in them ending up in the home directory.
So in linux you have an extra directory just for configuration files/directories wich often start with a . (Dot) (that's why they are calld dot files). But some applications dont use that directory but rather just dump them into your user directory, wich causes it to get cluttered with files wich should be put into the ".config" directory