[jle17]

I kinda like that flatpak forces application created files to end up in a predictable place. Firefox, like plenty of applications, was doing its own thing despite XDG conventions (~/.config etc and associated env vars) being 20 or so years old, now everything is in ~/.var/app, plus flatpak knows if it belongs to an installed application or not.

Although I would have preferred if the hierarchy was reversed, so instead of having ~/.var/app/<app>/{cache,config,data} for each application, I could have all files of a category in the same place as to be able to manage them more easilly (say remove all the cache, version all the config), like it is now for the applications that respect XDG dirs.

[nieve]

Except isn't ~/.var/app is just another "doing its own thing" directory?

[jle17]

Yeah kinda, but at least it's not every applications doing their own thing, it's the thing that runs applications, so assuming you only run sandboxed flatpak stuff, you end up with only one thing.