this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
298 points (99.3% liked)
Linux
13472 readers
420 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, I have essentially never used these folders unless a program sticks something there by default (mostly pictures).
I just save everything to ~/Desktop anyway.
A thing I started doing years ago, to combat trashing to ~/Desktop or ~/Downloads:
Set /tmp as your default download directory.
At least for me, almost everything I download is just ephemeral and would collect dust
Putting it there causes it to be cleaned up on the next reboot. No more piles of junk on the desktop (the virtual one at least. Don't ask about my physical desktop)
That's a good idea until you download a 10GB file and you wonder why you're out of RAM :P
I use /tmp as a temp folder for yt-dlp (it is faster than an HDD when adding metadata and subs to the video), and I've ran out of RAM before by downloading a video too big... Silly me, my laptop only has 8GB.
True, but only if you use ramfs for tmp, which not all distros do
If you don't, then it's not going to be cleaned up on reboot.
I don't have it as ramfs and it gets cleaned up perfectly fine. never had a system where it doesn't
I relocated the default folders that are useful to another drive, I pretty much don't use the home folder at all apart from some random github pulls or some shit