To me, the real problem is not the dotfiles, but the regular (i.e. non-hidden) files that applications surreptitiously create in my home folder. (Which the author does mention as being particularly bad.) dotfiles in the home folder are not a new thing on Linux (e.g. .bashrc, .profile, .emacs, etc.), even if it would be better if more applications used the XDG folders. And if I don't see them when I "ls", they don't bother me.
But nowadays, lots of applications seem to think it's OK to put normal files in my home folder without asking first. This is just outright barbarism. In particular, Ubuntu now seems like it's all-in on snaps, and if you use snaps, they create a non-hidden "snap" folder in the user's home folder. Madness! And when people complain, the devs have the gall to suggest that this is all fine:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
I like the idea of snap/flatpak in the abstract, but until they get their act together, and stop creating non-hidden files in my home folder without asking first, I am never going to use snaps.
And of course, all this is on top of the new fashion for the OS to "helpfully" create Documents, Music, Video, etc folders in my home folder, and set the XDG environment variables to point to them. Noooooope.
But at least in that case the user can change the environment variables and delete the stupid folders. No such luck with ~/snap.
But nowadays, lots of applications seem to think it's OK to put normal files in my home folder without asking first. This is just outright barbarism. In particular, Ubuntu now seems like it's all-in on snaps, and if you use snaps, they create a non-hidden "snap" folder in the user's home folder. Madness! And when people complain, the devs have the gall to suggest that this is all fine:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
I like the idea of snap/flatpak in the abstract, but until they get their act together, and stop creating non-hidden files in my home folder without asking first, I am never going to use snaps.
And of course, all this is on top of the new fashion for the OS to "helpfully" create Documents, Music, Video, etc folders in my home folder, and set the XDG environment variables to point to them. Noooooope.
But at least in that case the user can change the environment variables and delete the stupid folders. No such luck with ~/snap.