I absolutely despise the following directories: Documents, Music, Pictures, Public, Templates, Videos. Why? Because applications randomly dump stuff into these directories and fill them with junk files. I don’t want any application putting anything into directories I actually use, unless I explicitly tell them to. It is not possible to keep your files organized if applications randomly dump trash files into them.
Same shit happens on Windows. Games will just install their shit literally all over OS with no rhyme or reason to it.
Why can’t the save game and config.ini just be in the main god damn game directory? Nobody knows.
Actual reason is system permissions.
Most the default installation path is Program Files. That needs elevation to write to. Fine when you’re installing something, but not something you want to need just to run the game.
Writing to %APPDATA% or really anywhere in %USERHOME% is guaranteed to have the right permissions for this user.
Granted, a lot of home PCs and gaming PCs are single-user environments. The “personal” computer. In that case there’s no reason games and applications can’t be installed in %LOCALAPPADATA%, and in fact, I think windows has an environment variable or registry setting for that.
It’s no different in Linux. You don’t want users writing to /etc. And you may expect multiple users. So all of that stuff goes to dot files in $HOME.
Microsoft OWNS not just gaming companies, but one of the largest gaming hardware companies and many of the largest game developers.
You’d think by now we’d get a dedicated Saves folder to organize this shit after this long.
There is, been there since 7. Just hardly any game Devs use it, including Microsoft.
My Documents > My Games is kinda the default, but then you have steam cloud syncing and tons of games that default to various Appdata folder seemingly at random.
C:\Users\Username\Saved Gamesis a thing. Not a lot of games use it though.There’s also
C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Gameswhich seems more popular with some devs. Though some devs inexplicably use the base Documents folder, which is just obnoxious.But yeah, a lot of devs still use AppData. I read a post from a dev once that explained the advantages and disadvantages to each Directory, though I can’t remember the specifics, there is at least logic to why saves get stored in so many odd locations.
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They’re probably trying to handle per user config. But nowadays, there’s mostly only one user using a machine.
I have my own directories on windows. I never use system provided directories for my own stuff, it always sucks. And if I want to move directories between drives or just change permissions, all hell breaks loose because everything depends on the default locations… So I just leave them be if I can.
I just keep my stuff far away from
$HOMEand not bother about the junk. Not even a subdirectory under$HOME.Same goes for ’ My documents’ on windows.
This is why I’ve made a “Filing Cabinet” directory. My stuff goes in there nice and organized, while I ignore the rest.
These places are a cesspool of junk in every system, it’s incredible. MacOS has this kind of shit too, just like Windows, with apps dumping crap there without a care.
