XDG base directory specification

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 5 threads.

People raised many different problems with XDG base directory specification, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 8 complaints

Config and data hidden under dot-folders clutter the home directory and are hard to find2026-04-26
Users can't tell which dot-directories an app wrote, so removing its leftovers means guessing2023-08-16
Setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME to temp dir misses data in ~/.local/share, so it's unreliable for clean profiles2023-03-24
Config can be in three places, so users must check all of them to find it2023-03-24
Hidden ~/.local and unwanted folders clutter and confuse the home directory2023-03-24
Resetting a program to defaults now requires digging through .config to find its files2023-03-24
Hard to understand; documentation is obtuse and lacks clear definitions2019-02-03
Developers find the XDG directory spec confusing and hard to follow correctly2016-04-17