I am using nautilus and I have multiple hard drives.

The problem that I have with my "personal" folder is that it is full of unpersonal crap, like snap, Public and Templates. Also, it gets constantly polluted by software without asking for permission.

I want to have /home on my SSD and the media on my HDD. What I find repeatedly suggested is to create symlinks inside of $HOME that point to a data partition.

But, do I really have to use $HOME? How about using my symlinks on /mnt/home/$USER, to use in parallel to $HOME? (leaving $HOME for pollution, such as Dropbox or snap). This way I have my truly personal place on which I have full control over. I have never anyone suggesting this, it seems like everyone uses $HOME.

To integrate this with nautilus I'd make user-dirs.dirs point to my "other" personal folder. Most of the software, like Firefox, understand this modification. This also avoids nested mounts for my SSD / HDD division of $HOME, which is another benefit. To make it more clear, what I am suggesting is to create some personal folders, like "documents" and "projects" somewhere else, and integrate them conveniently in my Desktop Environment.


I found a commenter which made his $HOME readonly. This would most likely break some of my brain dead software I am relying on, though. I don't have the time and nerve to do this.


here are some of my references:

How can I stop Steam from polluting my home directory?
I'm tired of folders littering my home
Defending Home
Don't pollute user space
Bug report for snap in home


P.S.: I know that I can literally do anything I want on linux file system, but I am a little afraid of this much power.
P.P.S.: I really hope this goes through the spam filter with all these links!

Rather than read and look for a bunch of technical solutions to this typical e of issue, instead what I've always done is set my APPLICATIONS to save to different locations, or done so manually as they perform save as operations. Same for my browser, I tell it to always ask me where to save files.

As far as all the hidden or other config/application support files, I just let them go where the application writers want and intend them to go.

In short, while I have a $HOME, I do not store my data there.

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Ok, so in general we have a division of application files and personal files. The goal is to define a place I completely own for my personal file structure. I want there to be those 5 root folders, which I created, and nothing else. (Documents, Projects, Media, etc, "homework" )

On many poorly written applications those application files go on places XDG never intended them to be. As for personal files, there is no doubt that these follow your own conventions and are stored wherever you tell them to.


where do you store them? What is your opinion on my suggestion of /mnt/home/$USER ?

I tend to use $HOME for all personal files. On my systems, they’re at /home/$USER
You can of course set a user’s home directory to be anywhere you want it to be.

I do just the opposite. I make sure that source code is not stored in $HOME. I put them in /src, which is, of course, in the root partition. I’ve created $HOME/bin directories as needed, have added them to $PATH.

Having a consistent setup on a multi-user system is critical, of course. That may not be an issue in your case.

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I store them on a data drive. I do this by saving to a location. I don't look to reconfigure things I just save and store where I want to.

But technically it's a mounted drive. It's also the same name at each mount, I don't need a special alias or symbolic link to it. There already is a link to a mounted file system.

I tend to delete all those Windowsy directories like Documents, Pictures, Templates, etc. and use my own directory structure.

I set up a dedicated disk that I have mounted on $HOME/Data. All of my project directories, documents, etc. are all created in that filesystem. $HOME has a lot of config files and config trees (with caches, etc.) but all my data resides in the the $HOME/Data filesystem. Some application config files that are normally in $HOME have been moved to $HOME/Data/etc/config_files and symbolic links created in $HOME to point to them (for example, my Emacs config is set up this way). A few frequently used directory trees (docs. devel, etc.) in $HOME/Data have symlinks in $HOME. One thing that makes this setup easier to use is to configure your file manager of choice to initially point to $HOME/Data---$HOME always seems to be available as a default selection in the "places" sidebar if you ever want to go there.

Making $HOME read-only? I cannot imagine how annoying that would be. I've heard of sites that make "/usr" read-only but never $HOME.

Cheers...

Interesting article.
I should try that sometimes.
Take those XDG specs seriously, make apps obey them as far as possible.

Where that fails, making $HOME read-only (not recursively!) could be helpful.

Many apps create folders and files willy-nilly for no good reason (meaning, you don't even change the configuration, it just stores window positions or some such cr*p).

But over the years (since $person wrote that article), this has gotten much better.

I must admit that I am personally just as responsible for a messy $HOME as are all these old applications that store dotfiles there.

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I came to the same conclusions. Abandoning $HOME and reinventing it is BS. Rather, I'll improve my knowledge about XDG and clean up $HOME.

I'm in and out on that one. I have to try out first. BTW it must be writable where that fails, and read-only in all other cases.

Looking at my $HOME I cannot confirm. I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 and am seeing lots of folders that have been reported as fixed. Somehow I have the feeling I am dragging around lots of legacy files from older installations that are completely useless by now. I really have to cleanup my $HOME.


Me, too.

This also shouldn't be about a clean $HOME specifically.

To me it becomes 2 things.

1. An awareness of where my data is in the event I need to move it or back it up.
2. An understanding about which application settings and preferences I may wish to keep track of if I have to move to another system or restore things.

One can easily "put" data somewhere. There are obvious system locations which would be inadvisable. There are default locations for data and settings. Understanding them seems to be better than something else, in my opinion.