this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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That's basically what $HOME is is used for in UNIX: a place for applications to store user-specific files, including user data and user files.
https://www.linfo.org/home_directory.html
UNIX, and afterwards Unix-like OSes, were designed as multi-user operating systems that supported individual user accounts. Each user needs to store it's data, and there's a convenient place to store it: it's $HOME directory. That's how things have been designed and have been working for close to half a century.
Some newer specs such as Freedesktop's directory specification build upon the UNIX standard and Unix-like tradition, but the truth of the matter is that there aren't that many reasons to break away from this practice.