Nowadays I make a folder for everything (even if there is only one file in it) but not subfolders ever.
Movies and TV shows live in ~/Videos, Music in ~/Music, downloads in ~/Downloads and are moved to ~/Download/Archives if binaries or drivers or computer things that I might need later. ~/Documents is huge but it contains everything but only folders and it has a ~/Documents/Archives for things not needed anymore. ~/Documents is ideally for documents not produced by me. Those produced by live in ~/Dropbox (1 Tb).
I have a ~/Dev with a ~/Dev/Documentation (produced by me), ~/Dev/DocRoot, ~/Dev/tmp (for experiments), ~/Dev/containers, etc.
~/Desktop is empty.
~/Images is for memes I'll never look at again (digital hoarding) and that wallpaper I have been using for years.
There is a ~/.notmine but it's not mine, don't know what's in there or who put it there and who manages that content.
On Windows I have %USER%\Desktop\Documents because %USER%\Documents is insane (every app put things there that aren't mine).
The most important step for me that removed clutter was putting everything in its own folder.
Kinda.
Nowadays I make a folder for everything (even if there is only one file in it) but not subfolders ever.
Movies and TV shows live in ~/Videos, Music in ~/Music, downloads in ~/Downloads and are moved to ~/Download/Archives if binaries or drivers or computer things that I might need later. ~/Documents is huge but it contains everything but only folders and it has a ~/Documents/Archives for things not needed anymore. ~/Documents is ideally for documents not produced by me. Those produced by live in ~/Dropbox (1 Tb).
I have a ~/Dev with a ~/Dev/Documentation (produced by me), ~/Dev/DocRoot, ~/Dev/tmp (for experiments), ~/Dev/containers, etc.
~/Desktop is empty.
~/Images is for memes I'll never look at again (digital hoarding) and that wallpaper I have been using for years.
There is a ~/.notmine but it's not mine, don't know what's in there or who put it there and who manages that content.
On Windows I have %USER%\Desktop\Documents because %USER%\Documents is insane (every app put things there that aren't mine).
The most important step for me that removed clutter was putting everything in its own folder.