[txtsd]

The point is to have a clean home directory.

[jl6]

Abandon hope.

I just treat ~ as a system-owned configuration area, and put my actual files (documents, photos, etc.) in a completely different hierarchy under /.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

"/home/${USER}" for whatever junk programs are going to stick there, "/home/${USER}/home" for my "real" home directory.

[oftenwrong]

I have been doing this for decades. My files are in a sub-directory of $HOME. It also makes it very obvious when a piece of software does not treat your $HOME with respect.

[trollbridge]

You could write a kernel module, then, that just hides certain symlinks from you (which is effectively what this module is).

[ComputerGuru]

On Windows this was always easier because, for some reason, most everyone respected %appdata% compared to XDG_CONFIG_HOME, but also because hidden files wasn’t just a naming convention but an actual separate metadata flag.

[Sardtok]

Always... Except for the decades before this became common. Never a bloated C: root directory. Microsoft even had games store stuff in My Documents\Games at one point. My Documents was a user dir that saw a lot of abuse over the years.

[Joker_vD]

That ship has sailed 30 years ago.