xdg-ninja VS vuizvui

As a user, these variables make my experience simpler. I'm not going to argue that these specifications should be followed by all, because I know there are many users who are committed to dying on the hill that is their cluttered home directory. However, the existence of these variables is not a deterrent to users who do not want to use the specification, as many applications will want to use your home directory anyway. If the existence of these variables made the specification strictly followed, projects like xdg-ninja (https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja) would have no reason to exist.

Regardagin cargo (and other tools), I've had some success with following suggestions from https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

It's not as bad as it used to be. And ther's even software that can help you with that: https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

Check out xdg-ninja

https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

This utility has been a lifesaver to clean up my home directory.

Stuff like [xdg-ninja](https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja) helps but... at one point my home is still a mess.

For the ones that adhere to XDG specs, there are tools that can help transition to using these XDG directories and avoid breaking programs - like XDG Ninja - but it's still a sort of manual process that doesn't cover all dotfiles and applications.

There are shell scripts like xdg-ninja that can help with this:

https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

View on GitHub

For games, I think it's even worse on GNU/Linux systems, since most game developers mainly target Windows and sometimes completely ignore conventions for other platforms (possibly since some game engines have that "Build for Linux" button).

This also applies to game engines and their own conventions. For example Unity has Application::persistentDataPath[1], which uses $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (still a bit meh, since I wouldn't treat savefiles as "config", but at least some convention). However, some games tend to write those into Application::dataPath[1] (or even other random directories they see fit), which is supposed to be read-only and could possibly be outside of $HOME.

Fortunately the single one advantage of antivirus software out there seems to be that the above seems to break with some AV, so developers either tell their players to disable AV or they simply fix the issue. I made countless bug reports on this issue and so far it exclusively got fixed because of AV, so I'm using that as an argument for future reports.

While at least most of the Unity games I've packaged seem to adhere to these conventions, other games and game engines are a mixed bag and I've seen games dumping their stuff into $PWD to games writing to Windows paths (eg. /home/foo/SomeVendor\Somegame).

Patching these games is also very tedious, since some of them tend to get updates, so patching needs to be done in a way to be forward-compatible.

For example here is a patcher I wrote to get Factorio to adhere to XDG:

https://github.com/openlab-aux/vuizvui/blob/4690494feee20a62...

Here is an example for patching a Unity3d game that writes to Application::dataPath:

https://github.com/openlab-aux/vuizvui/blob/4690494feee20a62...

[1]: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Application-persist...

[2]: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Application-dataPat...

This is actually very easy to patch: https://github.com/openlab-aux/vuizvui/blob/61b943d89b08959e...

Essentially it's disabling gesture activation, so if you want to allow audio you need to do this explicitly. Note however, that whenever you directly visit a video file, audio will still play but this is very rarely the case.