Solid rant:

My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn’t belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can’t place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear again if I try to delete them.

Let’s see here, in my $HOME directory:

ls -l | wc -l # => 18

vs

ls -la | wc -l # => 114

96 hidden files! I guess it’s never really bothered me, but that is definitely excessive.

To those of you reading this: I beg you. Avoid creating files or directories of any kind in your user’s $HOME directory in order to store your configuration or data. This practice is bizarre at best and it is time to end it.

What do you think, is this a real issue or just a pet peeve?