XDG

Raised as a usability problem by 6 people on Hacker News over 6 years (2021–2026), in 6 threads.

People raised many different problems with XDG, 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 6 complaints

Xdg-open is hard to work with; custom replacement gets overwritten by updates2026-06-05
Apps scatter dot-file configs unpredictably, so users cannot find or control where settings live2026-04-29
File selection and screencasting break on new installs, needing hand-tuned configuration to work2025-12-15
Hard to remember default config paths per tool, and can't easily share setup2023-03-24
Opening files depends on obscure MIME types, and xdg-open's decisions are hard to troubleshoot2021-05-14
Defaults are wrong and reconfiguring them is a pain for the user2021-04-22