Mildly Infuriating

That's neat!

whispers Zombocom

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...

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.

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

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

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%.

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."

At least it's in %appdata%, and not in %userprofile%.

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

I believe the intent is to use appdata for user-specific configs and programdata for system-wide configs.

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

No. Hiding files is still just an attribute.

Actually, technically, it's two. Files marked as system files are treated as hidden as well...