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If you're talking about .DS_Store, understand that it's not just by comparison that it's better; .DS_Store does a lot for MacOS users and while they have no idea that .DS_Store does this, your average Mac user probably would be upset to lose things like the Finder column defaults per directory, the window position, etc.

While I understand it's an annoyance to deal with an OS specific feature, at the same time, .DS_Store is so predictable that I just can't see how it's a challenge to deal with. Everything you need to know as a non-Mac user is basically "you don't need to consider this except by special request", and at worst, the end-result of not considering .DS_Store is your user(s) have to reset a few window settings.

I truly don't get the vitriol expressed towards .DS_Store; it's a hidden system file like any other and I struggle to understand the use cases where having .DS_Store in a directory is an issue. I have read countless articles complaining on it, but I've not heard a reason beyond "it junks up file systems", which can be said about _any_ system file.




Why isn't something like that required on windows or linux?


Linux has XDG base directories despite many vendors no using them.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory

PS. I don't know about Mac but Windows also have similar directories although more of a mess.

There's no reason to save artifacts or local user config along with data.


Windows has Thumbs.db


And desktop.ini, for folder customization


Perhaps that information doesn't need to be preserved. There also doesn't seem to be a way to modify this behavior.




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