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Other than a short dalliance with Arch, my linux experience has been with Debian/Ubuntu based distros, so maybe that answers my question...

I know I can rename /home/$USER/Download to anything I want, but it seems odd as every other folder is lowercase.

...just wondering

Kusalananda
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kevcoder
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    Probably because they're *slightly* more user-friendly. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jun 03 '18 at 01:51
  • Another for them being more user friendly. What do you mean by every other folder are lowercase? Which folders exactly? – Nasir Riley Jun 03 '18 at 02:05
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    It's a "Linux on the Desktop must look like Windows/MacOS" thingy - I never had `Downloads` or `Documents` in my home dir until some "Desktop" programs decided they were needed. And they are empty, and don't get used. All used folders in my `$HOME` are lowercase. – dirkt Jun 03 '18 at 03:51
  • @NasirRiley really?? Every other folder as in /opt, /var, /home, /home/$USER/.config, etc etc – kevcoder Jun 03 '18 at 19:09
  • @kevcoder Yes, really. It wasn't clear as to whether you were talking about all of the other folders in the /home/$user directory or the ones in the rest of the entire filesystem. In any event, it's most likely to be user friendly as those are the folders that users would work with the most often (unless most of their work is being done in a network share). The folders in `/opt` can vary as packages installed there by the system are normally lowercase but someone can create folders themselves. Where I work, there are many systems with uppercase and lowercase folder names in `/opt`./ – Nasir Riley Jun 03 '18 at 19:19
  • @NasirRiley apologies... that was bit snippy. I appreciate you taking the time to answer – kevcoder Jun 03 '18 at 19:50
  • @kevcoder It's all good. I didn't take any offense to it. The best way to compare it is to look at the folder names in the user directories in Windows and MacOS which are uppercase which explains why Linux would do the same. – Nasir Riley Jun 03 '18 at 19:59

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File and directory naming conventions says Free Desktop Project is to blame for these conspicuous capitalized "Desktop" directories I've always been bothered by. As described in the post, you can change the directory names and XDG configs so that file explorers will treat them specially, but chances are you will break something that relied on the old paths. (You could symlink Documents to documents but that just leaves duplicate directory names.)

qwr
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