Grayjay Desktop App

Launching the Linux release and noticed in the logs:

Directories:User Directory: /home/bisby/Grayjay

And there is a directory there now. I absolutely hate having stuff automatically create anything in my home directory like this. Ideally, this should be following XDG directory guidelines on linux: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

Grayjay dev here. If you want it to use your user directory like other apps, just remove the file called "Portable". Keep in mind that it just uses your working directory to write files otherwise.

Sorry, to be clear, I dont wan't Grayjay data in my user directory AT ALL. Portable is basically what I want, I'm just very untactfully dropping feedback about where the data is placed.

Even with the "Portable" file, it creates a directory `/home/bisby/Grayjay`. I don't want that. No app should ever put a file or directory directly in `/home/bisby` without me asking it to. The Linux standard for "where should an app put it's files" is defined the XDG spec that I had previously linked (https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/).

The summary is that user specific data should live in $XDG_DATA_HOME and config should live in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (and various other things like $XDG_CACHE_HOME). If these values are unset, there are predefined places to put the files (eg, data in $HOME/.local/share or config in $HOME/.config, cache in $HOME/.cache).

This puts all the Grayjay data in places like /home/bisby/.config/Grayjay (instead of /home/bisby/Grayjay) which is nested away inside a hidden directory and structured in a consistent way.

This would be the equivalent of putting data in %AppData% in windows instead of cluttering someone's "My Documents" (or whatever the modern equivalent of that is).

Some of the Linux decisions feel a bit like linux is a complete afterthought, but included because Linux users tend to agree with the FUTO philosophies. That is a reasonable thing given the Linux market share, and for "Build Version: 2" that I'm seeing the app info, I'm grateful that linux is included this early. This looks like it can probably replace freetube for me. However, it would go a long way if things are done to make sure they are done the "right way" on Linux (ie, on packaging and on directory specs).

Thanks for the work you've done on freeing up the web.

If you're launching it as "Portable", and you're launching it from your home directory, it's going to place the mutable data in the current directory. This is very standard for portable apps.

So no, "portable" is not what you want. If you launch it as non-portable and it drops a folder in ~, then that is a problem.

In both modes it creates a ~/Grayjay directory, even when launching from ~/tmp/grayjay/Grayjay.Desktop-linux-x64-v2/ so ~/Grayjay was inevitable. In portable mode it makes the directory and does nothing with it. In non-portable mode it dumps a ton of data into the directory. I didn't pay attention to what the data actually was. So yes you're probably right.

But either way, Portable mode isn't behaving portably because it's touching directories outside of the current directory, and non-portable mode is putting data in ~/Grayjay instead of ~/.config/Grayjay so it doesn't do what I want it to do in any mode.

I'm quite happy actually that while this is a HUGE annoyance... It's also only an annoyance, and VERY simple to fix (as long as they do). Which means that this app is likely going to wind up as a daily driver for me once a few things get ironed out. I see the concept and structure of the app, and I like it.