this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025

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XDG_CONFIG_HOME (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by alyth to c/linuxmemes

84 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The template of this meme is that of the man who cheerfully points his hand at a butterfly, asking "Is this a pigeon"?. In this meme, the man has been covered with icons of the applications IntelliJ, VSCode, Chromium and Signal. The butterfly which he points to is overlaid with the caption ".config". He asks "Is this a trash can?" At the bottom of the image, we see the command du -sh executed on the directories .config/chromium/ and .config/Code, yielding file sizes of 1016M and 83M respectively.

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[–] Brewchin 34 points 2 days ago (6 children)

So much this. It's like these clowns don't read the XDG directory spec and think $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME are interchangeable, and even that cache files can be in either or both. No, one directory you need to backup for when things go sideways, and the other can go to /nev/dull.

I'm not a fan of ~/.local/share/ being the data directory (two directories deep seems stupid), but it's definitely where regular data belongs.

Never mind developers who, in 2025, still think their project is special enough for a $HOME dotfile/dotdir or - somehow worse - those who put $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/<weird-name>/subdir/[subdir/]. The latter strikes me as well-meaning Windows developers trying to follow best-practice-like-Microsoft-does, but it makes my teeth itch.

Rant over. :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Never mind developers who, in 2025, still think their project is special enough for a $HOME dotfile/dotdir

Well, Firefox is pretty special 🤡

[–] Wilmo 3 points 2 days ago

This is why I use flatpaks. Keeps most of the offending the dotfiles in .var directory scoped to the app itself

[–] renzev 2 points 2 days ago

No, one directory you need to backup for when things go sideways, and the other can go to /nev/dull.

This is why so many people have a separate git repository for their config files and a scripts that symlinks or copies those files into the actual ~/.config.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There's a dedicated 10th circle in hell for this people. As someone who runs a root-on-tmpfs system, PLEASE document which dirs your application is using.

It is a total pain, specially with non standar ones.

But tbf there are a lot of Linux devs who neither have read a single line of any Linux standard API.

XDG_DIR, Portals, Secrets, D-Bus, the Desktop file spec, Appstream… are there for you to read. 🥰

[–] renzev 11 points 2 days ago

XDG_DIR, Portals, Secrets, D-Bus, the Desktop file spec, Appstream… are there for you to read. 🥰

Standard compliance is a total mess in the world of linux desktop apps. My pet peeve is that $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR should point to a customizeable tmpfs that apps can use to store temporary data. But just TRY setting to anything else besides /run/user/1000 lol. Half your apps will be broken. Even apps that are made by/for the freedesktop people (e.g. Helvum, the pipewire patchbay app) struggle with this lol. This spec came out in 2021 -- three years ago -- and it's already ossified to the point of being barely useful. At this point I don't blame devs who say "fuck it" and just dump their tempfiles into /tmp the way ~~god~~ dennis ritchie intended.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Better than dumping into ~/

[–] renzev 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Archwiki has a huge list of apps that do this with instructions on how to force them to not do this. You might find it useful.

Personally though, I've given up on wrangling stubborn apps and just use flatpak and docker for everything. It can't crap in your ~/ if it doesn't have access to it!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't get why so many programs do this. This is ridiculous

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

When I use a computer for a few months my ~/ always gets so “messy”, I hate it!

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 3 days ago (12 children)

Well dont use chrom*

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

The signal community should band together and write a signal client that doesn't use the waste of space called electron. There is a rust library for signal and slint for cross platform UIs. Slint is even working (slowly) on mobile targets

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There already is one called Flare. It uses rust IIRC.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Thanks. I'll have a look at this!

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Non-flatpak🤮 link: https://gitlab.com/schmiddi-on-mobile/flare

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I use ungoogled chromium, but only for sites that absolutelly don'y wanna work on firefox.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 days ago (10 children)

I'm surprised. I haven't had a website not work with Firefox for a long time. I haven't even had to install chromium as a backup in almost two years now.

[–] pufferfisherpowder 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Just yesterday I had shadow.tech's Cloudflare "vErIFY yOuR hUmAN" fail on me in Firefox. I had fucking paid for a month already otherwise that would have been enough to turn me off.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I'm taking an online based college that makes heavy use of some heavier apps like web based virtual machines that function as 'lab environments' for development assignments. These refuse to function unless I'm in chromium of some kind. Same with the online based proctoring tools the school uses when you take tests n stuff - chrome is the only browser that can be used, and I have to specifically use a windows device 🤢

Always fun to see what I've been "missing out on" in the chrome experience, when I'm forced to use it. Man, the Firefox UX is a dream compared to chrome!

Really hoping on that FOSS browser that's on the horizon! Ladybird, I think it's called? Hopefully it won't be shit! 🤞

[–] devfuuu 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

They are out there. I also have it around for those occasions. More common that you'd expect. Almost always some shitty site needed for work that has problems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah my previous I remember needing chromium. It was a dev shop though, so we figured out browser agnostic processes eventually.

[–] wreckedcarzz 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Proxmox, when connected to a host, will not see symbols and instead type the numbers instead (shift+1 etc). But it will still type a character, and it's hidden from the user, so you end up screaming WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT until you try to sudo in fucking chrome and whoop works first try.

Found that like 9 months ago. Still pissed as fuck. Like 2h of my life gone, thought I fucked my root account, fucking pissing myself trying to copy data off before I do anything in case I was fucked.

PM needs to fix their shit.

E: Oh, cpanel recently broke too. I can login, but am immediately logged out because lack of a security token. That one might be because I'm using librewolf, but it was working a month ago so...

E2: synology, both nas and router, works sometimes in LW, but other times it loads the page but no content. This is regardless of if I am logged in and refresh, or if I'm just trying to login. Shit just doesn't reliably work. Chrome, it's fine.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Well you do use files named chrome.css, as Firefox based browsers have their style css in that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Fun fact: Unrelated to the browser of the same name, it's the "window chrome" of the browser

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (7 children)

Yes ok my mistake, despite * I am of course not talking about files with e.g. .css extension but only the browsers with chrome* as name. :)

Edit: Above all, I don't want to imply that Firefox and co don't use system resources just as wastefully. But they are still the better choice.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

Chrom, grant me my RAM....and if you do not listen, then the hell with you!

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

It gets worse, when I was doing a refine of a Mistral-7B, on both the Linux and windows rigs the default location was somewhere on my OS drive in either %appdata% or some .config/.cache bullshit which stored the entire LLM along with all checkpoints and whatnot.

Nutter. My C drive on windows is a 120GB, all my programs are on my Q drive in software RAID. With Linux I follow the same principle, all heavy files are on a separate partition.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

Why is separating the OS with files necessary? I don't think large files slows down the OS anymore, because of SSD.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 days ago

Because it makes reinstalls really easy. You can just nuke your OS but everything else remains there safely.

[–] meekah 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not necessary, just really convenient when your OS breaks

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

For .config it isn't as important to me, but putting things that can be re-created in .cache (well the proper environment variable that defaults to .cache) is very nice because I don't need to back up all of that junk.

But it wouldn't be unreasonable to put something like .config in a git repo, and storing full history for large and frequently changing files is a waste of space if they aren't really "config".

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I use an SSD for the OS, on my Windows rig a 128gb drive. For files I use mainly hard drives and/or other SSDs for programs.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Apps I write put config files in XDG_CONFIG_HOME/appname/, which is usually ~/.config/appname/. What's wrong with that?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

1GB of files is not configuration.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Oh I see, the problem is misusing it for stuff that isn't configuration, yeah that makes sense now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Thats how its supposed to be, but if your config dir is tens of megabytes large, you're doing something wrong

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

IntelliJ IDEA runs on a jvm right not a electron app??

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I think it might still be dropping executables in .config, stuff like the JDK or even its own software versions