XDG and Freedesktop (was: Re: Program to dole out jpg's to subdirctories, card-dealing style.)

On 2025-06-29, Eli the Bearded wrote:

In comp.os.linux.misc, Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sat, 28 Jun 2025 14:07:22 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I refuse to use drag-and-drop.  It's too dangerous, even for experienced
users.  One slip of the finger on the mouse button you're dragging, and
it's time for
$ find ~ -print | grep <myfilename>

>
Valid, but I'd probably go with:
>
     find ~ -name \*myfilename\*
>
I don't use drag-n-drop because I don't use any file manager I can drag
from.
>

In my case, it would just end up on the desktop. (What? You don't have an
entire virtual desktop dedicated to things like your email client?)

>
Nope. Why would I need a virtual desktop for mailx? I don't have a
"desktop" I have a root window blissfully free of icons. If only I could
convince XDG aware programs that "Desktop" is not a place.
>
$ grep -i desktop ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/.empty"
$ (cd ; du .empty)
4       .empty
$
>
Elijah
------
does a lot of command line file management on his phone, too

Such XDG "compliance" does tend to introduce some annoying things that
in no way appear to be designed to cater to users who don't want the MS
Windows experience, or the freedesktop idea of what Linux-based systems
should be like.

* This idea of "Documents" and "Desktop" being folders that exist.

* The whole XDG_CONFIG_HOME approach is needlessly incompatible with the
  standard (even if just de facto) configuration directory approach. All
  it'd take to avoid the breakage would be requiring subdirectories of
  it to begin with a "." - then backwards compatibility could perhaps be
  a matter of setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME to $HOME?

* There have been changes breaking expectations and standards in how
  copy-paste is handled in applications and toolkits because at some
  point it was seen fitting to follow some other specification for how
  copy and paste is handled, and places where Shift-Insert used to paste
  from PRIMARY now paste content from CLIPBOARD.

Even in the event this was all in good faith, there's definitely more
than just one occurrence of it breaking compatibility bad enough that it
amounts to pushing the freedesktop view of what the system should be.

Not to mention now there have been utilities adopting the
XDG_CONFIG_HOME approach... but what does that mean for other UNIX and
UNIX-like systems? Users on other systems have to do it the freedesktop
way now?


There was also the introduction (or more widespread adoption?) of yet
another separate mechanism to handle file types and protocols, this one
apparently focused on "the desktop environment will provide a way to
handle it" - at least there are command line utilities that can
manipulate the settings, and IIRC these also work without a desktop
environment, despite the wording of at least the xdg-settings online
manual page suggesting it requires one. I think the only challenge of
this one, once one knows the tools, might be that it requires "desktop
entry" files (".desktop").

(Cf. my (non-)answer at https://askubuntu.com/a/141178, but do note that
the accepted answer, not mine, is the one which addresses the actual
issue in the question.)

--
Nuno Silva