Why are .thunderbird and .evolution hidden ?

[Marcel Rieux]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 4:50 AM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 16:47 +1100, Chris Smart wrote:
>> I'm sure there's a more accurate historical reason, but all of your
>> application's configuration settings and data are stored that way to
>> avoid you deleting things accidentally and keep your home directory
>> clutter free. Under Windows things are hidden away in weird places
>> like "C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Data\Application Data\" but
>> on Unix, everything related to you sits in your home directory. Where
>> else would they put it?
>
> There's been arguments for ~/local/ or ~/.local/ for some time, so that
> all the stuff you normally don't want to see is one place, and you can
> use all of your home for yourself, without having to weed through the
> chaff.  It would make backups easy, where you can back up all your
> configurations, without personal files, or vice versa, without making
> lots of rules about what to include/exclude.

Need I say I'm all for such a solution? I you want to get market share
and, in teh end, not only have geeks roaming the web with Lynx, you
have to ease things out for newbies... which should change nothing for
experienced users.

Experienced users are the ones who should deal with more
configuration, not newbies.