Shameless plug: I am the author.
100% agree and I also despise devs who do this on windows, instead of using %appdata% they’re using c:\users\username\.myappisimportantandtotallydeservesthisdir
Not to mention - this isn’t necessarily the correct place for Windows anyway. That is exactly why they standardized stuff around Vista.
Plus - what about apps that store an ungodly amount data in there? Personally, I only keep the OS and basic app data (such as configs and cache) on the partition and nothing else.
Then something like Minecraft comes along and it’s like “humpty dumpty I’m crapping a lumpty” and stores all its data in “.minecraft” right there in your user directory.
Then you gotta symlink stuff around and it becomes a mess…
I think that also causes issues for roaming profiles and folder redirection. If roaming is turned on then everything in the %appdata%\roaming folder is synced to a server. %AppData%\Local is not. So if your app is using %AppData%\Roaming for temporary data then you are causing a whole bunch on unnecessary IO. Same for using Documents since that if often synced.
To be fair here, appdata is technically a hidden folder and there are lots of reasons an app would want it’s data accessable by the user.
