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.