I get your arguments as a fellow dev (why it is not trivial to change, why it is not hidden by default). I also get why it is irritating to users, it is to me as well. And I don't think the dev arguments hold very well from the user friendliness perspective. Below I will try to illustrate this with a use case and share a proposal/idea for a potential user friendly workaround:
You argue that the current solution passes the 'grandma test' because 'grandma' (non-tech user) might want to find the files she just created by this snap app that fails to use the home interface, to send them in an email. That's why the snap folder is not hidden, to ensure she can find them. This would mean she has to look for the files in e.g. ~/snap/MySweetApp/38. Not knowing it is a snap app (and what snap apps are or that they exist in general), possibly having many snap apps in the snap folder (might not even know the name of the app, just the icon that needs to be clicked to launch it), and possibly multiple revisions (which by default will be organized in ascending order). This certainly sounds like a stretch to me. Seems more likely that the user will just think the app is broken and fails to save the files. I think making the directory hidden or not makes negligible practical difference for such use cases. What I would do (until epochs and whatnot are implemented and the snap folder can be moved), is something like this: - create a folder with a localized (!) name corresponding to something like "Application data", that means something to the (potentially not English speaking) non-tech user and doesn't feel out of place next to Documents, Pictures etc in the home directory (or even inside Documents) - have the current revision workdir of every snap application be symlinked there (so e.g. "~/Application data/MySweetApp" -> ~/snap/MySweetApp/current) when it is created - make sure that "snap" is included in ~/.hidden so it doesn't clutter the user's home dir (or well, you could just hide ~/snap with ~/.hidden and make "Application data" itself a symlink to it, though that could make the different revisions still confusing for non-tech users, but also would be easier to implement) This would be my solution to attempt to have the cake and eat it too: the user will have a pretty home folder and more chance to find the data files because of the more descriptive folder name, while at the same time the code relying on ~/snap will not break. I don't know about the feasibility in terms of how confinement works with symlinks and such, maybe that would make things too complicated. These are just my two cents, maybe something like this can help if implementing the original change takes very long (which can always happen). Sorry for the long post! -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1575053 Title: Please move the "$HOME/snap" directory to a less obtrusive location To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1575053/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
