LinuxIf you are using a rolling release distro like Arch, you might have noticed that your home directory now has a new member, a new folder called "Projects".
For as long as I remember, Linux has always had a set of default folders under the home directory. Usually they are Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos and Downloads. Templates, Desktop and Public folders are also there.
Now we have a new addition in the form of "Projects".
Honestly I say just let the user decide what goes in their home directory. I always get annoyed at all the random garbage in there. There should be a specific place that is user owned that isn't filled with cruft and configuration files
Yeah, I have essentially never used these folders unless a program sticks something there by default (mostly pictures).
This breaks my workflow. I always add a workspace folder for such things.
Hah, thats funny, I... literally have a 'Projects' folder, though I'm running Bazzite.
hoists suspenders
Yep, made that folder on my own, gets the job done, mhrm.
... lol
(pleasedonotlookinsidetheProjectsfolderdeargoditissuchamess)
Fuuuuuuuck
Tbh not a bad idea but I have nightmare about windows and their 3d models folder that they put everywhere
Okay so next up is the Porn folder, right?!
That one was proposed but people were not able to agree on the name. Homework was the leading candidate when i last checked.
I feel called out by the first sentence of the article
Cool I guess? I'm a weirdo who always puts projects in Documents/ so... maybe I'll use it more from now on
I love this! Now to remove other unwanted folders like templates and music
It's pretty much the first folder I add on a fresh install, gotta keep that shit contained
Honestly I don't mind this at all.
When I start a Godot projects, putting the project into Documents makes very little sense to me.
Its amazing how bothered people are by a fucking folder 😂
A whopping 2KB of unwanted bloat.
Forcing their facist file structure on is is literally wors than windows!
/s
I came here expecting people ranting over it. Let's see what they have...
Everyone complaining, and here I am not having noticed the change because I've created that directory for myself years ago :-P
Personally its for organisation
I do the same, source code lives in it.
What do you put in it? For me the logical place for that would be ~/Documents/projects
All my projects, which to be fair are mostly programming.
~/Documents/Projects doesn't make sense to me because theyre not strictly documents. In documents i have - well, documents like bill receipts, forms ive filled in, etc...
My projects are a first-order thing for me if that makes sense, so it makes sense to have them in the top-level of my home.
Luckily I created mine as projects so I don't have to worry about it writing a bunch of shit into my actual projects folder, or having to fix the xdg setting to disable it.
Ill have to check exactly what it writes there and see if i want to disable it
Samesies.
Lmao, same
Y'all don't just do everything out of your Downloads folder?
Living dangerously in agile times. I do it in /tmp and I set auto clean for every reboot.
auto clean for every reboot
Mount /tmp as tmpfs, dummy. It's literally in the name.
~ is kinda hard to reach. I just put everything in root so I just have to type / once to find everything.
/s
Oh cool I'll also start using "/s" folder
Everything is just in /. I patched directory support out of ext4.
I thought I was the only one, it's just so easy to use it as your base working folder. Things get organized out as whatever it is moves forward to some arbitrary point.
Documents for me, but yeah
My wife's Windows 10 desktop can fit one more icon. Just need to overlap a few others here and there.
Perhaps your wife needs something like this?
My man!
Sigh... Yet another thing pushed by the self-appointed nannies at freedesktop.org that I will have to manually undo on practically every new account.
At least it will probably be configurable, unlike Canonical's infamous ~/snap directory.
I like this idea. I've been doing pretty much the same thing for a while now, though it's been a subdirectory of Documents.
Mine is on the desktop 🤷🏼♀️
I made SO MANY directories under home that could have just been ~/Projects that I'm annoyed with myself for not doing something so simple.
.... I'll be using the projects directory heavily going forward
As someone who has used ~/Projects for years and has syncing and other setup around it I am (very slightly) terrified this change could somehow fuck with me.
Please let this just be a mkdir call that will fail.
I also use a Projects folder. It looks like it probably won't break anything. Apps might start putting stuff there by default, hopefully in sensible subdirectories. There's a note in the article that you can create ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to specify where you want files to go.
Nope. Only makes for new installs, and only uses it as a save spot default if the application asks for it. Should be no change at all.
it's excessive for me. I'll continue putting my projects with my documents.
This is the way. Everything I created in folder in Documents. Everything I downloaded in downloads. Home should be otherwise empty, except for all the left-over dot-folders that old software leaves lying around.
the "for as long as I remember, Linux has always had a set of default folders.."
lmao..
they've been bugging me with their presumptuousness for decades.
They can't ask if we want those things?
Sure, I can understand people coming-from the MS-Windows paradigm needing such things done for them, but to just presume that everybody wants the defaults?
Why not simply ask, in the 1st-login, if the user wants such defaults?
Opt-in, rather than opt-out, you know?
I add a ~/prog directory, that I'm certian many who either program or are trying to learn programming, add.
Does that mean it ought be a default?
Why would I want a Public folder in my homedir?
_ /\ _
Those files all go in documents. Jesus, why are we doing it this way?
No documents are for documents.
You store git repo in your documents?!
I make it? Subfolder in documents.
I’m fucking with someone elses? Subfolder in downloads.
We have a Programs folder for programs we've written ourselves. (Then a "repos" folder for stuff we've cloned.)
Yes
Absolutely. Some under a work subfolder, some under various other sub-folder depending on what they contain.
Actually they all go in nextcloud/projects
But why are the names ~~camel~~ Pascal cased? It's a little bit more annoying to type.
Yours are camel case? That's weird. My folders are pascal case.
Indeed, fixed.
Because any normal person would want it upper cased. Most people never type these folder names.
Yes, Linux should appeal to the masses, otherwise we will never get rid of Windows. No, this doesn't apply to anyone on Lemmy cause nobody on Lemmy right now truly qualify as "normal person", statistically speaking.
i feel normal but nobody knows that i am wearing Batman socks.
... until now.
Windows user appeal?
And Mac.
Hell, Mac even capitalizes /Users (where home folders are)!
-- Frost
Appeals to Java programmers too.
So does self-flagellation, but we don't provide default whips in the Kernel.
I always change the defaults to another place and to have another naming. Just camel casing those folders is already stupidly annoying. I guess one more silly one into another folder out of view.
I already do the following:
- media with images, music and videos inside
- changes to small case for desktop and download
- change documents to docs
- create another folder called shares which I moved the public folder inside.
- hide the templates folder that nobody knows what is it for, so it becomes .templates
- no idea what the projects is supposed to be about, maybe I can map it to the already existing dev folder...
hide the templates folder that nobody knows what is it for, so it becomes .templates
I think the templates folder is for the "New File" items, I forget how it works but you can make custom new files similar to new Text File, Empty File, etc
I never even thought to check. Was Games not a default folder?
Pure bloat. I will be personally switching to the Hurd Kernel just because of this change.
/s right?
And that's where it should stop.
shouldn't have even started imo. it's hard for me to believe creating a projects folder is done often enough that people can't just continue to make their own
I wish they would combine Pictures and Videos into Media.
Holiday videos goes into pictures and movies into Videos?
And Music? But they'd still need subfolders to keep the content organised and then it begs the question why hide it all away a whole layer lower down from the Home folder?
Pictures and Videos typically refer to personal media, whereas music would refer to professional media. I don’t think grouping them into a single media directory would usually make sense.
Oh, that's what I do, you just have to customize it. I have media with images, music and videos inside.
Why? What would I want to have the folder for? I never had it with any OS I ran. It’s either in the documents, or I’d create my own directory with the name I want. I have different types of projects, so I’d prefer organising my directories myself.
I wasn’t sure the fuck this directory keeps appearing in my home, kept removing it over and over again. Can I disable that?
Aha, it’s in the article:
Don't like the new Projects directory? Just delete it. The xdg-user-dirs utility will not try to create it again. The default location for this directory will be moved to your home directory.
It recreates them for me.
Power users, who want more control, can edit the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs configuration file and modify it to control what goes where.
This might help, I guess.
At least projects is an understandable purpose, I don't use the Templates, Desktop and Public folders at all, and aside from desktop (which I know is a workflow thing that I don't even use) I would need someone to explain them to me. I'm guessing public would be for a multi-user system, templates maybe for printing stuff (I do not).
Templates is super useful! You can make a copy of any file you put there in any other directory with right click > new. Some examples I usually have in my computers are 'newFile', 'newTextFile.txt' (just blank text files), 'newTextDocument.odt', 'newSpreadsheet.ods'... but once you start you'll find many more things to add like, if you're a programmer or web dev you'll put files with all the boilerplate already in them, if you design fashion you'll put an image of a figure template to draw over (in your format of choice), you have to make monthly schedules? Throw a table/spreadsheet with the days, format, colours... already in it. Anything you find yourself repeating is a good candidate to go into your templates folder.
Interesting. I guess I'm not that far along (sort of stalled now), and quite possibly may never really need that.
Though for this one:
Some examples I usually have in my computers are ‘newFile’, ‘newTextFile.txt’ (just blank text files)
creating a blank file and renaming to .txt before editing seems good enough for me.
I think Templates is for cases where you make lots of documents that have the same starting structure. Like a letter head, or a spreadsheet you recreate every month. The starting structure can be saved in Templates so you can copy it ever time you need it. Maybe I'll put a Nix flake template there instead of always copying from a recent project.
Public might be for files that other users have read access to on a multi user system? Or maybe for network shares? Or a personal website? I'm not sure. Edit: I found a comment saying that Gnome file sharing uses Public.
Templates are auto-used by some software, but I don’t understand why it’s not hidden. E.g. .templates or some .app/share/templates. As not many people would ever use it, and those who will would find the location easily.
Desktop, I never used it, but I understand the workflow. I used it as a quick directory to send some files, which I could symlink. Some people use it. And some DEs show desktop files.
Music and videos, I see no point. Not many people use them at all, and for me those were separate disks (which I never needed mounted in my home). Now, it’s all separate machines (for self-hosted media content and servers).
I use only documents and downloads, and in general, that’s enough for me. Also I use some top level directories, and I name them myself. All my files are my projects, I see no point in having any other files in my home.
I have a .hidden file to hide the rest.
I do use music and video (Flash animations in video too), though yeah they have been moved to slower drives (because data, easier migration). I use XFCE but don't use desktop icons.
