The cursed Linux alternative of this is usually putting things directly in the home folder – I used to do this until I got better. Desktop is simple to keep clean when you don’t have one in your “desktop environment” by default.

Some people who’ve used MacOs before OSX dump everything to the root filesystem out of habit. It works just as poorly as a file management strategy as one might expect, albeit better than putting everything on the desktop. Not sure how often that happens but I’ve known multiple people to do that.