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
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.
Ctrl + Shift + O opens a threaded conversation in a new tab.
Settings > Composition > Use paragraph format… set to unchecked
Search has always worked pretty well for me, with the exception of not searching message bodies in a folder that's set to only download messages on demand. If the folder is set for offline use, the bodies are there and searchable. I use the Quick Filter bar 99% of the time, anyway, it's great.
So often the answer to "Can systemd just do that?" is "yes." But before AI, it was hard to surface the way to do it. Now I can get a lot done just by asking Claude for a few ways of doing something, and often the systemd answer is there.
For something like this I don't think you need to know much about systemd to figure it out, without AI. I promise it is worth the effort to learn some basics of systemd units. It then becomes easy to learn things like path triggers, timers, mounts, etc because they all follow the same pattern. The annoying (and nice) thing about systemd is that these files are a bit verbose. I'd suggest just dropping a few templates in your dotfiles. I do that (I even did that with cron).
For this file, it's pretty straight forward to read. I'm telling you because I think it'll change your mind.
The file name ends in ".path"[0] (it starts with `~/.config/systemd` so it is a user process with user permissions), meaning it monitors paths. Simple!
Then what matters is what's in `[Path]`. `PathExists` is the path being monitored. `Unit` is what service runs. In this case whatever is in `~/.config/systemd/user/remove-thunderbird-dir.service` but guess what, `Unit` is completely optional here. It will default to that. You can probably guess `%h` means `$HOME`. The `[Install]` is necessary though, but that's going to be common and everywhere.
Cumbersome? Yes. Annoying? Mildly, but it's worth it and just minorly inconvenient. Difficult? No. Powerful? YES
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
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
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 second highest voted bug in Ubuntu history, but no, Ubuntu devs think littering the home folder with highly visible system-level machinery is totally unavoidable.
It's like putting your car's engine in the passenger seat - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid. What if Grandma was browsing her home folder and deleted `~/snap/` because she has no idea what it is?
I want to add an addendum to this. There's just so much bad naming everywhere. So often I'll be looking for configs and can't find them because the name of the configs folder isn't remotely the same as that of the program. How is anyone supposed to know? `~/.config/TrollTech.conf`? Are you really telling me you don't expect people to be confused? The only nice thing I can say is that at least it is put in `~/.config` and not `~/.` There's plenty of things with more menacing looking names too.
Hell, it isn't even computers. I bought a monitor from Samsung recently and it showed up in my bank as Hanwha Vision. You google it and you find a wiki page for the company, and read
> Hanwha Vision (Korean: 한화비전), founded as Samsung Techwin, is a video surveillance company.
or you look at the parent company, which was originally Korea Explosives. Seriously, if fucking In N Out can show up as "IN N OUT <LOCATION>" they can just show up as "Samsung" or something else actually meaningful.
I know there's 2 problems in computer science but there's a huge difference between not having a good name and having a misleading name. And don't get me started on emails. People wonder why there's so much fraud, but I'm just impressed there isn't more. The normal way things work makes it hard to distinguish things from fraud. We've just created a world where the signal is impossible to distinguish from the noise because we decided it was a good idea to obfuscate the signal...
Personally I have never been bothered by programs using my home folder. I don’t regularly ls the contents of it, and just browse by path from my shell anyway, so the clutter is barely visible to me
The other day moved the Thunderbird folder profile to another PC, the password was not saved, and I ignored the password pop up a few times, then it started deleting the inbox emails
And it is not the first time it feels unreliable
I would like to think there is a good and reliable open source email client
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadSettings > Composition > Use paragraph format… set to unchecked
Search has always worked pretty well for me, with the exception of not searching message bodies in a folder that's set to only download messages on demand. If the folder is set for offline use, the bodies are there and searchable. I use the Quick Filter bar 99% of the time, anyway, it's great.
Still my preferred client.
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
For this file, it's pretty straight forward to read. I'm telling you because I think it'll change your mind.
The file name ends in ".path"[0] (it starts with `~/.config/systemd` so it is a user process with user permissions), meaning it monitors paths. Simple!
Then what matters is what's in `[Path]`. `PathExists` is the path being monitored. `Unit` is what service runs. In this case whatever is in `~/.config/systemd/user/remove-thunderbird-dir.service` but guess what, `Unit` is completely optional here. It will default to that. You can probably guess `%h` means `$HOME`. The `[Install]` is necessary though, but that's going to be common and everywhere.
Cumbersome? Yes. Annoying? Mildly, but it's worth it and just minorly inconvenient. Difficult? No. Powerful? YES
[0] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
It's like putting your car's engine in the passenger seat - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid. What if Grandma was browsing her home folder and deleted `~/snap/` because she has no idea what it is?
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
Hell, it isn't even computers. I bought a monitor from Samsung recently and it showed up in my bank as Hanwha Vision. You google it and you find a wiki page for the company, and read
or you look at the parent company, which was originally Korea Explosives. Seriously, if fucking In N Out can show up as "IN N OUT <LOCATION>" they can just show up as "Samsung" or something else actually meaningful.I know there's 2 problems in computer science but there's a huge difference between not having a good name and having a misleading name. And don't get me started on emails. People wonder why there's so much fraud, but I'm just impressed there isn't more. The normal way things work makes it hard to distinguish things from fraud. We've just created a world where the signal is impossible to distinguish from the noise because we decided it was a good idea to obfuscate the signal...
If you create your own `~/thunderbird` directory, then Thunderbird will stop littering your home directory.
My pick is Evolution but there are many other options.
no, you use the specifiwr %h instead of ~ here is the expensive list of specifiers https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
And it is not the first time it feels unreliable
I would like to think there is a good and reliable open source email client