Comment 31 for bug 48734

That's a start, but a Public would make so much more sense. Then when you
want to share something you do that, but you don't have to separate the
organization of your documents and other personal files by whether they're
"private" or not. Would it really be too hard to add a checkbox for this so
people could choose for themselves? If you collected the data on who choses
what, I would be willing to bet even if it weren't default at least 50% of
people would choose to protect their home directories.

As an aside, the ~/.appname being private is by no means standard or
default. In fact, most of them are public. A short list:
.bluej
.codeblocks
.config
.dia
.evolution
.fontconfig
.freemind
.gimp
.gstreamer
.gtk-bookmarks
.hardinfo
.icons
.java
.kde
.nautilus
.openoffice.org
.subversion
.svnqt
.texmf-var
.themes
.update-manager-core
.wapi
.wine
And that's just on my system...

On a semi-related note, is there any actual reason why Linux defaults to
cluttering home directories with invisible files? Mac OS X's system of
storing everything in a Library folder again seems far more intelligent, as
we could avoid this whole problem by locking the ~/Library folder as Mac OS
X does.