I thought if I downloaded the Blender 2.8 zip it would be contained to that folder. However, I’ve noticed it keeps creating a USER folder deep inside my computer with some preferences.
How do I stop this behaviour? According to Blender manual, that should not happen and every single setting should be contained inside the main extracted zip folder.
That is the normal behavior however you can modify where and how Blender looks for settings. See these Env variables.
Environment Variables:
$BLENDER_USER_CONFIG Directory for user configuration files.
$BLENDER_USER_SCRIPTS Directory for user scripts.
$BLENDER_SYSTEM_SCRIPTS Directory for system wide scripts.
$BLENDER_USER_DATAFILES Directory for user data files (icons, translations, ..).
$BLENDER_SYSTEM_DATAFILES Directory for system wide data files.
$BLENDER_SYSTEM_PYTHON Directory for system Python libraries.
$TMP or $TMPDIR Store temporary files here.
$SDL_AUDIODRIVER LibSDL audio driver - alsa, esd, dma.
$PYTHONHOME Path to the Python directory, eg. /usr/lib/python.
This is Linux? Inside your extracted zip location there’s a directory named 2.80. Try creating a directory named config inside the 2.80 directory (so …/myunzipspot/2.80/config ) and then start Blender and see if it comes up clean (will then prompt you for your left or right click preference etc. in the initial splash screen).
This works on Windows and will cause it to keep everything inside your unzip directory as you were expecting, but I’m not certain about Linux. On MacOS it’s different.