Home folder litter is one of my top pet peeves in computing. In fact it's the only reason why I refuse to use snaps on Ubuntu. I don't even care about whatever technical stuff everyone argues about - but snaps create a permanent `~/snap/` directory and Ubuntu devs don't care. There's been a bug report on Launchpad for over a decade[1] and it's the highest voted bug in Ubuntu history, but no, Ubuntu devs think polluting the home folder is totally unavoidable.
Imagine polluting a user's home directory with the basic down-and-dirty machinery of package management - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid! What if Grandma were using an Ubuntu computer, and deleted that folder because she has no idea what a snap is?
I've long given up on keeping a clean home folder because so many software do this and keeping it clean is a constant chore. Now I just make a real_home folder in my 'home' and put all my actual stuff there.
They can use the ~ landfill
I stopped using that software no matter how painful it was some games included. I wanted to play BG2 and the remake from GOG just litter the Documents folder even when running though Wine. Well, no game for then. Pity. I want my computer to serve me and to have my own files where yo want them.
Unfortunately, many applications now treat your filesystem as a dumping ground for their dependencies and caches and config files and temporary data and all kinds of other non-userdata trash they create. This ship has long since sailed :(
It does. Run `winecfg` and see ‘Folders’ under the ‘Desktop Integration’ tab. Wine used to link these to directories in your home directory by default; not sure if that’s still the case, but you can definitely change it.
I cant stand apps littering my home folder, regardless of if they are invisible folders or whatever. I am looking forward to deleting my operating system, or just the user account, and only installing apps in a virtual machine
There's more! On my machine it creates an empty ~/.mozilla/extensions directory every time it starts, and I have no idea why it does that or how to make it stop.
there's a stupid solution that I put in practice out of helplessness. I remove the writing permission on ~ to my user, only sudo can write on ~, so some apps simply fail to launch
There are so many annoyances in TB. I stopped using it after a few days. My primary concerns:
- Opening an email thread opens multiple (potentially many) tabs, and is difficult to nagivate or understand the flow of messages
- I don't know how to write an email without it making the spacing between paragraphs/lines larger than I would like. (I.e. double-spacing)
- Search is unreliable / broken.
> I don't know how to write an email without it making the spacing between paragraphs/lines larger than I would like. (I.e. double-spacing)
The Compose window by default uses Paragraph style. Change it to Text instead, that works like you want. You can change the default in the settings. Still not ideal because in some cases after certain types of formatting it still reverts to Paragraph style.
- You can do Shift+Enter to get a `br` without breaking the paragraph.
- You can change the format from "Paragraph" to "Body Text" to remove the margin. Note that Thunderbird changes new lines back to "Paragraph" automatically, so you need to frist write your email, then format it as "Body Text".
- Or, you can disable the "Use Paragraph format instead of Body text by default" option in the settings, to always have "Body text".
I've always wondered why HTML editors tend to work this way (Wordpress is the same), instead of having a single enter key be a line break and a double enter key be a paragraph.
Thunderbird does have a plain text mode, and you set it to be the default. Nice thing about TB is that defaulting to plain text doesn't lock you into plain text like a lot of other editors out there--If you add any formatting it silently switches you to HTML email.
You (and other folks...) should probably click-through to the bugzilla links. Yes, normally. But, it looks like some legacy code path near the XDG stuff caused an accidental extra dir creation.
(I was rolling my eye wading in, thinking that Thunderbird was doing XDG and maybe some distro just wasn't setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME correctly, etc, but alas, no it's a TB bug)
Imagine polluting a user's home directory with the basic down-and-dirty machinery of package management - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid! What if Grandma were using an Ubuntu computer, and deleted that folder because she has no idea what a snap is?
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
The Compose window by default uses Paragraph style. Change it to Text instead, that works like you want. You can change the default in the settings. Still not ideal because in some cases after certain types of formatting it still reverts to Paragraph style.
- You can do Shift+Enter to get a `br` without breaking the paragraph. - You can change the format from "Paragraph" to "Body Text" to remove the margin. Note that Thunderbird changes new lines back to "Paragraph" automatically, so you need to frist write your email, then format it as "Body Text". - Or, you can disable the "Use Paragraph format instead of Body text by default" option in the settings, to always have "Body text".
I've always wondered why HTML editors tend to work this way (Wordpress is the same), instead of having a single enter key be a line break and a double enter key be a paragraph.
I think maybe Thunderbird has a plain text mode where this doesn’t happen, but it’s been a while since I last used it, so I could be completely wrong.
It does have a plain text mode!
Just note that XDG_DESKTOP_DIR and XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR can not point to the same directory or chromium will disregard your config.
P.S. Reader, if you can commit to chromium without much hassle, check this and fix: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Talk:XDG_user_directories
(I was rolling my eye wading in, thinking that Thunderbird was doing XDG and maybe some distro just wasn't setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME correctly, etc, but alas, no it's a TB bug)