ITT: So what's the deal with home directories?

I've always hated the idea of home directories so much. (yeah it's a blogpost deal with it)

Back when I got introduced to computers with winshit 95 it was just my documents, and I never liked that shit. Due to incessant MS fuckery and my own noob ways the OS would often break and need a reinstall, often a reformat. There would always be the panic over oh shit what happens to my files. Back then it was the fashion to make a D: partition for your own shit so it wouldn't get fucked no matter what happens to C: which is where OS and all the stuff you installed lived.

Later windows started stealing more from unix and added the user libraries. I never used that shit, always left the the default sample files in there and never even touched it like some weird superstition. Not even open them, except as a last resort if I knew I saved a file and looked everywhere else and I knew it must have been sent there by the OS. I have my own system of files that I keep very tidy and well organized under a single top folder on its own partition, so I never use that home directory shit and don't trust it: If windows knows about it, it will try to fuck with it. If it fucks with it, it might fuck it up and eat my data. If I put it in some random place that the MS "engineers" have no way of knowing, the only way it gets fucked is if the OS fucks everything indiscriminately or starts actively snooping for it, which is pretty brazen so even MS don't do it that often. Backup is a breeze because it's just copying one folder and all you really lose is the permissions but permissions are shit on windows anyway (and what kind of peasant has to suffer sharing their pc with other people) so this way it's just an easier path to type.

On Linux things are saner and I know I'm "supposed" to have my shit under ~/, but I just can't. First, like I said, I know everyone knows about it and they'll keep trying to fuck with it, and I don't trust every single crapware dev out there to not fuck it up. Second, just imagining the backup gives me a headache.

Like I said, all the devs know about ~ so they put their configs and other shit there. My ~ is always littered with .dirs from a million things. I suppose the idea is, "if you ever need to reinstall your OS, you just copy over your home dir from backup and all your settings are magically restored!" Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Since I don't reinstall every week, I would have changed versions. I might have changed habits. I might have changed preferred programs. There could have been config files that got corrupt over time due to tarded devs. Configs from software I uninstalled, which are best forgotten, but weren't cleaned up properly. Why would I want to bring in all this crap to a fresh install? I've always looked at OS installs as a ritual of letting go of the past and starting over fresh. So if I actually kept my shit in ~, I'd have to go through this pointless exercise of sifting through all that shit that clueless devs thought was worth preserving, that in reality I don't give a shit about. Much easier for me to just copy my own dir and ~ can > /dev/null

Do any of you actually use your OS's home directory for your personal shit that matters? What's it like?

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but, on the plus side, if you know which files are important in ~/ then you can copy over just those to a new distro

Instead of copying your home directory just copy all the (non-hidden) content of your home directory, either by just drag-selecting it or with "cp -r *".

Copying configuration is still desirable if you're switching from one system to another with no significant time inbetween and without reusing the old instance of the directory. You won't have changed habits and software breakage is surprisingly minimal.

Destroying user files is just about the worst kind of bug a user program can have, and it's very rare. Especially since toolkits tend to have functions that direct crapware towards ~/.local/share/$program or some similar place where it would be very hard to do harm. All the instances of destroying home directories that I know of actually destroyed all data on the system recursively, so that would get your files even if you put them in a non-standard location.

Like most Loonix users I just put everything in my home directory. It works fine.

Oh, you don't know the half of it. I come from the old Mac world which didn't just lack user folders, it lacked dedicated software paths, and even OS partitions!

That's right, on classic Macs, the entire OS fit inside one folder, and you could have multiple OSs anywhere in a single partition (the one currently chosen to boot from was "blessed"). Want to transfer your OS to another partition or computer? Drag and drop, done. Want to maintain multiple OSs? Copy your System Folder, modify its contents, switch as desired when rebooting. It even worked with multiple accounts, through software like Easy Access.

Want to install software? Drag and drop to any folder, partition, or even another computer over the network. Plus, unlike OS X, software silently installing OS extensions or hierarchies of invisible files on first run was unheard of. User settings were stored in one folder, Preferences, inside the System Folder, and almost never in the application's own folder.

And actual user documents, even things like save files from games or templates from word processors? Put them anywhere you want, name them whatever you like, since each file has a redundant hierarchy of actual metadata including unique IDs, instead of relying purely on hardcoded pathnames.

Of course, all this started going down the drain during the late-System 7.5-era, when increasing amounts of undisciplined Windows ports, combined with accommodationist "features" from Apple like dedicated user and application folders, plus core parts of the OS being dumped from the System file into the Extensions folder normally reserved for 3rd-party use.

The entire paradigm which typifies every other OS, that of installing software in "default locations", "migrating" settings and enhancements from one "OS install" to another, opaque hierarchies of invisible files and folders full of arcane settings, and running everything from some sort of autopolulated launcher in concert with a "filebrowser" that feels more like a web browser than a proper file manager…

All of it was once alien to me, and remains so even as I am forced to walk the wastelands today.

How bout I don't.
Reported.

...

What's the worst that could happen, they put a non hidden folder in your home directory contributing to clutter? In one case Darktable put two in my picture folder by accident after an update, one with a capitalized first letter and the other all lower case. In years of constant fuckups on my part while trying out hundreds of programs or system components that's the only thing of note that I remember happening.

Right now I just copy /myshit/, and that path is its own partition and physical drive.

That sounds like a good idea, actually. Wouldn't that skip any hidden files inside my own data though?

So how good is Linux software at dealing with changes to the configs? I know that if you add or remove a new configuration to your program, the correct way is to not neglect adding conversion of obsolete config files. On Windows I'd say maybe a fifth of devs follow this. How is it with Linux? I think pacman will check the two default configs, and then if the new default and your own settings conflict tell you to merge it yourself. But that sounds a bit annoying, I'd hate to have to do it very often.

I'm sure. It's more the anxiety, not just about data loss but also some stupid dev accidentally putting junk in my shit, although hard to see how that would happen. I guess having a reliable backup system in place is the real solution to that anxiety.

I guess malware (though also rare) would try the home folder first, so it's a security through obscurity thing as well, but then again any serious malware wouldn't just assume I'm using ~ and leave it at that.

I really like the idea Sandboxie has - it lets the program delude itself into thinking it installed into whatever path, but actually puts it all under /Sandboxes/MySandbox/C/whatever. All the OS stuff referenced by the program, that's not in this mirrored tree, gets forwarded to the host OS, but whenever the program wants to create a file under the root FS, it just gets nested into the Sandbox FS.

What I'd like to see is my OS putting its own system files in one place, the files generated by the program's setup process in a second place (eg. a game's data files), and files generated by the program as a result of user action in a third place (eg. save games and non-default configuration). Plus a fourth place for files directly generated by the user, as opposed to a side effect of a program. I can then decide how I want to deal with each class (such as different backup schemes for each).

I think GoboLinux's tool could probably do something like this.

1v1 me m8

I really hate it when shit ends up in my shit without my knowledge. Like when you give your thumb drive to a macfag it always comes back with .DS_store and other crap in it, I fucking hate that shit. Of course the .DS_store is just a few top level things, not hard to delete, and I treat my flash memory as expendable DMZ so I never keep anything on it permanently.

But if something like that happened in my permanent data storage dir, my OCD would flip so hard. I lose sleep over this shit.

tl;dr
reported for extreme faggotry

All those freedesktop shits get deleted from my $HOME with extreme predjudice.