Firefox is the biggest offender for me. ~/.mozilla instead of something sane like ~/.config/firefox

Which indirectly led to this wild as fuck bug that nuked some poor user's data.

https://youtu.be/qzZLvw2AdvM?si=FznMm9CQxD-da9S6

Haha you just reminded me of that damn flashing broken steam sym link in my home folder, it's been there for years and I've yet to investigate or do anything about it.

lol that's great. Does flatpak Steam do that too? I can't see anything from Steam directly in my home directory, and I use the flatpak version.

Ninja can't help if the program does not want to cooperate :(

who would win?

dozens of conflicting standards on where to store files over years of poorly enforced linux development practice

vs

some symlink bois

for real tho, I discovered gnu-stow the other day and it looks like the ideal solution for this sorta stuff

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.

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.

Yes.

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.

A non-linux version of this meme might go,

"Here is the pizza you ordered"

"Great, could you put it in my hands"

"Lol (throws pizza on floor)"

$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.

You could probably do it with bubblewrap or something equivalent. Here's someone asking about this exact thing:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/651788/redirect-single-file-or-directory-using-bubblewrap

You know everything on that site was written in 2004 or earlier, right? That hasn't been the relevant spec for a long, long time now. We use xdg for that now. Configs go in xdg_config_home.

They probably just found an image of a pizza delivery guy and fitted it for the meme. I am not aware of any memes of pizza throwers other than Walter White