As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.

Yeah but the main issue is that I don’t want there to be a Downloads directory in my home.

Even worse, many components will ignore the XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR var so even if you manually change it to $HOME/downloads (lower-case) it will often break things.

a game I made in 1995

a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio

FTFY

Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.