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A screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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This is one of those things that makes me shake my head about Linux. It's these small dumb problems that make Linux inaccessible to the common person.
Yes because other operating systems never have any small annoying issues.
They do have small annoying issues. This is not one of them. This is something that would completely baffle a non-tech literate person. They'd just observe their computer becoming slow or not having space and say "well, Linux must have broken my computer."
FYI, Windows doesn't have any feature either to automatically clear all of it's temp folders (%TMP%, C:\Windows\Temp, C:\Windows\Panther), plus several other folders where orphaned files are often leftover, such as C:\Windows\Installer, C:\Windows\CSC, and various folders and cache files in your AppData\Local etc, to name a few off the top of my head.
I used to be a Windows sysadmin for a long time, and let me tell you, HDDs becoming completely full due to cache/temp files is very much a problem in Windows.
Guess what I found in
/home/{user}/.wine/drive_c/users/{user}/Temp, 10GB of log files. Although 9GB was from one time when I used Cheat Engine and I don't know what really happened tbh besides it causing a OOM crash.It created a 9GB sized file called
ADDRESSES.TMP, I never considered checking for temp files in .wine before. And I guess I should be checking all the prefixes created by Steam games as well...This has not been the case since at least w10, it has a tool to automatically clean several temp files and recycle bin.
If you're talking about the Storage Sense feature - it sucks. It only clears a handful of well-known locations, but it doesn't touch any of the orphaned content in C:\Windows\Installer, or the CSC or the old Panther folders from upgrades, not to mention several other files and folders in AppData. As I've said before, I've been a Windows sysadmin (until last year infact) managing over 20,000 devices, we've had Storage Sense on, but it's been mostly useless - to the point that I ended up writing own cleanup script and set it to run before we pushed out a new Windows feature update, because otherwise we'd get several devices which failed to update due to the disk being full.
I think it's that one. I certainly won't say it's a panacea, but I assume it would have solved the OP's case.
Have you checked your C:\windows\temp folder lately?
Oh yeah, you never hear such complaints about Windows or MacOS.
BTW can you recommend any good tools to cleanup my registry?
And don't forget to defrag, while you are at it.
Windows auto defrag now though. Dont hate me I love my Linux.
I once had a huge 20ish GB file in windows I could not get rid of, move, or delete. It was related to hibernation or something like that... Even though I had hibernation disabled and no amount of googling could get rid of the file.
This is something that would completely baffle a non-tech literate person. They'd just observe their computer becoming slow or not having space and say "well, my computer just broke itself better throw it in the trash and get a new one"
I've never seen any of my ~/.cache directories get more than a few GB either and I never bother to clean them.
I am curious what OP was doing that used that much space though. That's certainly not typical.
It was AUR packages from yay. I'm a CS major into gaming and emulation so there are a decent amount of programming build tools from the aur that I had, it looks like most of it is coming from storing all of the binaries from AUR packages, as intelliJ ultimate takes up 50 GiB, proton-ge-custom takes up 31 GiB, and Yuzu emulator takes up 16 GiB.
I get the same all the time. OP reminded me to check today and Jetbrains toolbox had cached a lot of downloads that took up 42 GB in total. yarn folder with 2.3 GB. bazel folder with 15 GB (apparently used for building Anki),7 GB paru clones.
All in all it added up to 82 GB.
Not really. I've never seen .cache get bigger than 10GB, which is about how big the temporary files in Windows get if you never clean them.
It ended up being yay storing binaries from previous versions of AUR packages, definitely depends on the distro/usage but for arch-based it definitely clears up a lot of storage
I've seen similar issues in appdata on windows when a program is poorly configured and simply grow its logs to ridiculous sizes. It's an issue with a program utilising that folder, not the os.
Well, they're an Arch Linux user which is a special case. On Arch and derivatives it's the user's responsibility to manage the system so this doesn't happen, configure cleanup daemons, flush package managers, etc., alternatively it could also be a misbehaving application which would have to be reported. Arch is for hobbyists who likes to do this.
On other Linux distributions, Windows or macOS if this happens it's usually an application not properly managing its cache.
I've been running Linux as my primary OS since the late 90s and have never run into this problem.
The hate you're getting for this is so revealing and depressing. It basically proves you right.
To the haters: where is the factual problem with this personal opinion? Have you considered making a counter-argument instead, instead of simply lashing out with the downvote button like spoiled infants? This kind of tribal pile-on really pisses me off. You are literally censoring an opinion expressed in good faith - downvotes hide comments and reduce reputation. All while offering no rebuttal, no ideas of your own, nothing. Nice work.
Not a "hater" in terms of trying/wanting to be mean, but I do disagree. I think a lot of people downvoting are frustrated because this attitude takes an issue in one application (yay), for one distro, and says "this is why Linux sucks / can't be used by normies". Clearly that's not true of this specific instance, especially given that yay is basically a developer tool. At best, "this is why yay sucks". (yay is an AUR helper - a tool to help you compile and install software that's completely unvetted - see the big red banner. Using the AUR is definitely one of those things that puts you well outside the realm of the "common person" already.)
Maybe the more charitable interpretation is "these kinds of issues are what common users face", and that's a better argument (setting aside the fact that this specific instance isn't really part of that group). I think most people agree that there are stumbling blocks, and they want things to be easier for new users. But doom-y language like this, without concrete steps or ideas, doesn't feel particularly helpful. And it can be frustrating -- thus the downvotes.
Fair enough, tho personally I don't see this "doom-y language" you see, I just see a slightly exasperated opinion expressed in good grammar and good faith.
But personally I don't downvote people for their opinions, ever, as a matter of principle. It's literally a form of censorship, given that it hides the comments. It leads straight to a deadening groupthink where dissenters are scared to open their virtual mouths. It creates a general aura of negativity and intolerance that helps nobody at all. Downvoting, as it is used by most people here and on the R-site, is an absolute scourge. If anything makes me leave this community, it will be this.
It is what it is. I've been involved in Linux communities long enough to know not to take stuff like this personally.
On Reddit we saw constant posts about why Linux isn't more popular but no one ever talks about all the dumb little issues that the distros have because of a slight lack of polish. Those little issues make the distros seem cheap compared to the polish of something like Windows.
I'm always amused at the replies I get with things like "When I had Windows it literally caused my CPU to burst in to flames and my SSD shot my dog. Now I'm running Arch and it showed me last night's winning lotto numbers."
Ha! Yes I agree completely with all of that.
And with your point here. In this world of pocket touchscreens and voice AIs, where young people don't even know what a file is any more, the geeks here are reminding each other to empty their .cache directory from time to time. I mean, do they have no self-awareness? Or perhaps they simply don't care if nobody chooses to use Linux. That at least would be coherent, but if there are no new users then eventually the whole thing will just die.
IMO I'd say the same thing about windows's "Temp" folder though.
I agree that a lot of Linux isn't user friendly but I'm also on a distro that is specifically supposed to be customized from the ground up (arch-based) using a tiling window manager which also involves configuring most things from the ground up. This isn't a problem that most Linux users will likely have, but it is a problem that people may have if they are power users trying to have full control over their system (people who will be on a community about Linux). From what others in this thread have been saying, non-arch distros (and even arch with other aur helpers than yay) tend to have much smaller caches that get up to around 10Gb at most, which is also similar in size to what Windows's temp directory uses.
This is a Linux community on a FOSS platform. This community is inherently going to be filled with more "geeky" people. Isn't this what we signed up for? You make it seem like Linux was ever attracting people who weren't these type of people to begin with. Computer science is still a growing field, and most sane computer science curriculums involve using POSIX terminal commands and by extension linux at some point. I'm a zoomer and can confirm, we're not all as hopeless as you think we are. Linux will be fine even ignoring all of its corporate and government backing. And for people who don't even know what a file is, they probably won't know what Linux is in the first place. Even if they somehow have a system preconfigured with linux, their Ubuntu or Linux Mint install will probably be clearing the cache for them.
Some good points here, I stand partially corrected.
There are in fact 2 completely separate things that irk me. The biggest is the virtual lynching that is mass-downvoting. I'm sorry, I will never ever pardon the downvoting of opinions, I think it's the illness of the social internet since the very beginning. See my many other recent comments for evidence of how strongly I feel about this.
The other issue is the actual one at hand! You're right that this cache folder business does not really concern most ordinary users, even on Ubuntu. But actually, if even we geeks need to tell each other to "remember to do X every now and then", I have enough of an IT mind to think "Why do we need to remember anything?! The tool should do this job for us!" These are "babysitting" chores and IMO on a decent OS there should be zero babysitting, it should be set up once and then it should work forever, with any tweaking optional.