I have the opposite perspective. Dotfiles are fine, and I find the proliferation of XDG directories confusing, mostly because they're misused. Why should a game's save files be under .config? Making dotfiles under $HOME is a simple approach that's worked for a long time and that doesn't cause serious problems, and I see no need to adopt the XDG approach, which I see as overengineered.
> I find the proliferation of XDG directories confusing, mostly because they're misused. Why should a game's save files be under .config?
A game's save should be $XDG_DATA_HOME, misuse is exactly that, misuse. I have hundreds of games installed on my linux machine and not a single one has put it's save files into my $XDG_CONFIG_HOME folder. On the other hand many DO outright ignore XDG and dump all their garbage into .game_name/.dev_name folders (looking at you Factorio). I think you are exaggerating the issue.
> Making dotfiles under $HOME is a simple approach that's worked for a long time and that doesn't cause serious problems, and I see no need to adopt the XDG approach, which I see as overengineered.
What exactly is over engineered here? It's just a set of environmental variables, developers ALREADY use $HOME to spam up my home directory. The only real effort a developer needs to put into this is making sure they separate their config, data and cache folders which is something most already do within their cute .program_name folders.
while maybe not "serious" I certainly do find it do be quite the problem that all user-specific program data is randomly dumped into poorly named hidden folders within my home directory. *Nix systems at a root level already divide config files into /etc, cached files into /var and /tmp, and data files into /usr. Why can't there be at least a little symmetry with how the home folder is handled?
The XDG approach is over-engineered: it adds complexity and provides no benefit. What is the specific concrete advantage of putting some parts of foo's state in ~/.config/foo, some in ~/.local, and so on? All this approach does is scatter what's conceptually a single state blob across different parts of the filesystem. I dealt with this stuff in Windows for years, and we don't need it in the Unix world.
The conventional dotfile approach is just fine: there's an application and it puts state under a directory named after itself.
