The Homegirl Philosophy
You have just completed a fresh install of your latest linux distro (mine is Fedora), and you log in to start updating and customizing your new install. What's that? The home directory is full of garbage???? It should be clean, I just installed this OS and it's my new home...
The home directory has become a wonderland for applications to store data specific to you, which works out really well for the application!
This is not designed with the user in mind. The user suffers from bloat. And this is a clean basic install with no additional applications installed.
Problem
- My home space, what should be the safest and most private space just for me, is now volatile.
- There is a default directory structure that I am expected to follow (Documents, Downloads, Pictures, etc). Who decided this? Fuck you.
- Backups become a nightmare as I am now backing up application data that I may or may not need (and can take up large space... I'm looking at you Mozilla)
- Modifications inside the home directory happen all the time and from who-knows which apps (e.g. you remove a directory like Downloads but then firefox recreates it because that is the default location)
So what is the solution? Well, we could talk OS design and governance, or we could create a modification to the system that quickly becomes complicated...
Or, just follow the Homegirl Philosophy and run a single command:
Solution
With privilege (preferred):
# mkdir /homegirl
That's it! No need to make any other changes. Just store all your files here! If you want, you can set the applications you care about, to use this directory including your favorite terminal emulator to start in your real home directory, homegirl.
You can use the root drive or make this a mount point. Bonus points if it's a completely different physical drive.
Then you can let your OS and applications run wild in your fake home directory! Because fuck em!
Without privilege:
$ mkdir homegirl
Why the name? It started as an inside joke/solution on a system that had a very annoying sysadmin. Our home directories were constantly being modified by scripts in the name of business compliance and had no real technical impact other than making our lives difficult. We convinced the storage team to attach an NFS share as a "sandbox" which really served as our real home directories. The female engineer that owned our case and provisioned the storage became our "homegirl" because she hooked us up with real homes. When asked by the storage engineer on where it should be mounted, it only seemed logical to mount on /homegirl