Some people have diacritics and spaces in their usernames, which wreaks havoc for badly written programs accessing AppData or folders in the user’s “home” directory, such as Documents. And there are lots of such programs.
When setting up Windows, use a short and memorable, DOS-compatible username, and then change it later (the home folder will still have the old name). You can then move indiidual Libraries (Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures and Videos) to the root of D:\ too.
programs writing shit in the document folder are so freaking annoying. I typically backup my document folder, as they contains most of my user files.
And some stupid program just decide to litter it with their temporary file, and game saves…
It is okay if they only do what you asked for.
“Okay, Audacity, save to ‘C:\Users\me\Documents\recording.aup’”
*folder 'C:\Users\me\Documents\recording_data' shows up*
Docker: right where you chose to put it.
It still doesn’t apply to propritery software.
Sure it does! Throw that festering pile of garbage into a docker container and keep it away from everything important while bind mounting the arbitrarily-placed config directory in the container to something sane on the host.
Shrug don’t remember the last time I actually needed to modify a system config file on Windows…
Software actually does store it’s configs in files… sometimes.
/etc or /usr/local/etc and done
For user space /home/$user/.config/application_name/config.file_name
Linux is confusing for non IT people looking for program settings. It might be in share, local or config or hidden somewhere. On W 10 I just look under ProgramData. Maybe W11 is different. But Linux application devs need to agree on a single place. As users sometimes need to access it for plugins and resources.
You mean the 2 ProgramData folders? Altho who the hell puts config stuff there? Anyways, the 2 official settings apps, the 3 AppData folders and then the registry for every little thing Microsoft doesn’t want you to edit for whatever reason? And then the countless 3rd party config apps for every device aiming to make this process easier? Yea I totally don’t Google where to toggle stuff on windows as step #1, noo… And W11 just has a slightly better 2nd official settings app, so sadly not too different.
Also who the hell puts config stuff on Linux into /local or /share? It was always in ~/.config (personal) or /etc (system wide) from my experience.
Altho who the hell puts config stuff there?
Permanent configs that should be shared amongst users, yes. Like, for example, AnyDesk stores it’s ID and encrypted password there.
That is what the xdg standard and file hierarchy standard are for.
I mostly saw them in ~/.config or /etc
~/.configfor local,/etcfor global.
I feel mildly aroused when I see a program or a game that collects everything in it’s folder and can be used from a USB drive. Some paid, industrial grade software leaves so much traces and depends on so much different hidden files and keys it’s making me sick.
Any game can be used from a USB drive if that USB drive is running a live OS.
Or if you just symlink /usr, /opt, and /home to that usb drive. You may be asking why you wouldn’t just mount partitions on the usb drive to those locations. This is not a question I will be answering
That’s deep 🤔
You can make a Confucius meme quote out of it.
Don’t forget that appdata nowadays has 3 sub folders, local, locallow, and roaming.
Also there’s C:\programdata
Also some programs just store it in the user folder, the documents folder, or games/ my games folder if they are a game.
What the fuck is local low? I don’t understand. Local is Billy G’s jizz… I get that… And Roaming is for poor plebs. But why LocalLow? Is it like cache? But I have seens games saving their save files there. I don’t understand
The folders actually do make sense.
Roaming: this data can be moved between machines in a domain if you have a roaming profile. E.g. go to another workstation and your browser configuration is the same? Means it’s in Roaming.
Local: this data will not be synchronized between machines when you roam. This could be your browser’s cache.
LocalLow: like local, but for applications that are “low integrity”, like Internet Explorer. These folders have special properties. https://helgeklein.com/blog/internet-explorer-in-protected-mode-how-the-low-integrity-environment-gets-created/
You can rename them in the environment variables UI. Has anyone tried this, any software who has the path hardcoded?
Btw, here’s the paths.
Has anyone tried this, any software who has the path hardcoded?
I know for certain that some Adobe products did have these paths hardocded (past tense, haven’t tried this now), because I moved my home/user directory on D:, yet they persisted to save the settings in
C:\Users.
Local is for regular apps, LocalLow is for depressed apps and Roaming is for high apps looking for munchies.
This is by far the best explanation
It could also be stored in the registry.
Oooh the registry is even more fun.
- HKLM, HKCU? These are statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged
- Store it in software, make your own root folder
- Also for 32 bit programs there wow6432node
- There’s also the policies section, but this kind of makes sense to have it split off
- Also make sure to follow the apple methodology of having multiple different key names like Apple, Apple inc., etc
I still have no idea why HK is in front… why is the key hot 🤔… and what key are we talking about…
Oh, yeah, and the different key names… Windows, Windows NT (WITH a white space…), Win…
HKEY means “handle to registry key”… Not that that helps anything.
When code opens a file, device, etc, it’s given a “handle” to it, which is an internal reference so that Windows knows which file you’re reading or writing, and it keeps track of where you are in the document. Similarly, HKEY_CURRENT_USER is the handle that gives you the current user part of the registry.
I know that, the HOTKEY_* part of it was a mystery, why is the key hot… I mean, why does HK have to stand in front of it, it could be simple like just LM, CU, U (Users… still does nothing and nothing in it gets transfered as a setting in new user accounts), CR, etc.
It’s HKEY (handle to key), not HOTKEY. That’s what I was trying to say in my comment. There’s no “HOTKEY”.
And half the time you’ll find it in the registry too. Linux has proven quite well that an OS doesn’t need a registry.
Oh, and what’s with ProgramData and AppData being two completely different things. I understand the difference between the two directories, but there is no difference between a program and an app. Everywhere else it’s Machine/User.
Linux has proven quite well that an OS doesn’t need a registry.
Gnomes dconf would like to have a word with you. It’s really interesting how the Gnome people seem to get rid of every useful feature as it might confuse the user or be complex, but on the other hand add this registry-like anti-feature to make the system just as unmanageable as Windows.
What you can find in dconf is well organized compared to what is inside of the regedit hell.
there is no difference between a program and an app
Yeah the naming is confusing. The reason is what you said - machine vs app.
Back on Windows 9x, some apps would store files directly in the
C:\Program Filesdirectory. This was ‘fine’ at the time since every app ran with full permissions. Users were atC:\Windows\Users, but users were optional so not every install used it.Windows XP had a better NT-based permission model (not nearly as improved as Vista, but better than 9x) and allowing regular users to write to the Program Files and Windows folders wasn’t really a good idea. It added two directories for settings:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Datafor user-specific dataC:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Datafor non-user-specific data
Vista kept the former but moved the latter to
C:\ProgramData. I can’t remember why.Windows 7 moved the user stuff to
C:\Users.Funny thing is, most 3rd-party utility tools don’t use registry but a config. Which makes them portable, btw.
Nowadays, yes. Go back 15+ years, the registry was used extesively.
My reasoning as to why, Linux was never a targeted platform for software back then, now it is. There was only GTK back then and it didn’t look “nice” (appealing) at all. Plus GTK apps were huge for Windows, since you’d have to also install the GTK runtimes and all that… that just took a lot of disk space, which was expensive back then. Compared to an app that does the same, but spends only 10% of the disk space needed for GTK (you could even go a lot lower with compressors), it’s obvious why GTK was never a viable option when making a GUI app.
And since Linux doesn’t have a registry (or even if it did, it’ll probably be completely optional to have it or not, so you can’t rely on users having it installed), you’d have to just save the settings in a file, just like the rest of the FOSS applications. So, it makes no sense to have completely different codebases for the same app for Windows and everything else. In fact, most apps nowadays that aim to be cross platform just use Qt. You can compile it for watever you like, there is no need to keep separate codebases.
The setting you’re looking for could be in
appdata%It could be inlocalappdata%It could be inC:\ProgramData. It could be in the registry. It could be in HKLM. It could be in HKCU. It could be in any of the userdirs. It could be in the application’s directory.HA! Joke’s on you, it was an envvar all along!
True story.
This is the real answer.
%appdata%
Takes you to the roaming subfolder though
Which contains 90% of what you search. Then just press backspace, and you reach the appdata folder.
Most configs should be in the roaming directory, since you’d usually expect them to roam between computers on a domain. The local directory is only for stuff that doesn’t make sense to sync to other computers - things like caches, configs specific to that individual PC, etc.
Not that it matters for home users, as home users generally aren’t using Active Directory with roaming profiles.
Tell that to the developers. At this point I’m sure they are just rolling a dice to decide where they should put things.
All that depends on developer. Majority of my used Windows software is portable stored in folder that’s synced with Dropbox. All settings are then usually stored in the same folder so I can easily copy SW over to another machine without loosing any configuration / history.
Some of those programs still do not store settings in same folder, you can often simply export settings from GUI.
To this day, I still don’t know how to set a path variable permanently in any Linux distro
I do feel like setting environment variable on linux is not as intuitive as on windows, but after I setup my workflow, I realized I never have the need to manually set any environmental variable besides in flatseal.
Maybe you have a specific use case for it?
export PATH=$PATH:/mypath1:/mypath2in~/.profile. Means “add:/mypath1:/mypath2to what is already in $PATH.” If you need the entire system to be aware, set or update it in/etc/environmentwithPATH=...
Or in /home/username/.applicationname/ if they want to be annoying.
Or in /etc/<application>, or in /var/<application> I’ve seen all of that, sometimes differing between distributions for maximum annoyance. So I don’t think we get to act smug in I’m this particular case.
This should be considered a war crime, and doubly so when they don’t even have the decency to prefix it with a dot (looking at you Golang). It’s my home folder, not a dumping grounds for random trash.
and snap
fuck snap
What does snap do to your home directory? I haven’t touched Ubuntu in a very long time
This is the “appdata” folder, this is where all the application’s data goes.
So whats the “Programs” folder then?
This is also where the application’s data and files go.
But I thought thats the “Programs x86” folder.
This is also where the application’s data and files go.
Ok whats “Program Files” then?
This is also where the application’s data and files go.
So my config file is in either one if those 4?
No thats in the “Documents” folder, obviously.Windows program data file structure has always been the wild west.
Yeah, the Documents config file/dir pisses me off the most as well!
Game save data? No, my documents.
Application config files? Again, my documents.
Temporary documents I don’t care about keeping? Downloads, duh.
My actual documents? Desktop.
My desktop? Turned icons off because it was too messy.Just another day using Windows…
I have to say I love having no desktop. Something about watching my coworkers become dependent on it is neurotic.
Agreed. It’s much nicer to see your wallpaper than a mess of mismatched icons that may need to be occasionally clicked.
Same here. I don’t need icons, just press
Winand type in the program. I just gotta pray for Windows to not open Edge and search in Bing.If you’re using Windows, you can get a much better experience by ditching the Microsoft start menu entirely.
Everything Search to index files and Flow Launcher for searching files and applications. You can even make it open when you press the windows key.
Or if you still want a start menu, Start11 is worth paying for to get away from Microsoft’s ad-ridden crapware they call the start menu. It even supports using Everything for showing file results.
System wide config for an application? Lets put that under C:\users*????
Don’t forget
%USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/Programs, where some programs get installed to because the developer doesn’t want to make it a system wide installation.And Linux isn’t? There’s definitely not a central location either.
Don’t forget about the hidden ProgramData directory at the root of the file system. Ableton Live likes to install there for some ungodly reason.
Don’t forget that there’s a hidden system junction at
C:\ProgramData\Application Datathat points toC:\ProgramData. Because everyone loves loops in their filesystem. Of courseC:\Users\All Usersis also a junction toC:\ProgramData. This kills updatedb in WSL.Always remember,
C:\ProgramDatais the eqivalent of/etcin Linux. If they don’t know where to put/hide shit, but needs admin priviliges to edit and users can only read, you put it inC:\ProgramData.I think programdata is closer to /usr/lib or maybe /var/lib.
You almost never see config files in programdata.
Selects separate drive for install
Adobe: “Imma, pretend I didn’t see that”
Oh that setting is super easy to change, just go to run, type in regedit, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE then just scroll until you find CLSID-73838-abf83-c758d57-87a90ba, set the value to zero and reboot!
Probably just log in an out, but still, I fail to see how this is easier than changing
some_bool_settingfrom=trueto=falseis harder… maybe because you actually know what you’re changing, so that makes it scarier 🤔.
There once was a time when configs were not in a universal place like .config. I have terrible memories of trying to fix a gnome setting gone wrong and having to search several files in four different places and just having to firebomb everything.
Still the case today… Not every Linux app complies with XDG.
