this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025

622 points (98.7% liked)

linuxmemes

22855 readers

1479 users here now

Hint: :q!

Sister communities:

Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html

2. Be civil

Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.

Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".

Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.

Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.

Bigotry will not be tolerated.

These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.

3. Post Linux-related content

Including Unix and BSD.

Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.

No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.

4. No recent reposts

Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.

5. 🇬🇧 Language/язык/Sprache

This is primarily an English-speaking community. 🇬🇧🇦🇺🇺🇸

Comments written in other languages are allowed.

The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.

Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.

Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

622

XDG_CONFIG_HOME (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 60 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Better than dumping into ~/

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 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] 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Often they were created before the XDG spec was widespread, and haven't been changed for backwards compatibility reasons or because nobody's been willing to change it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

I really need work on better use of containers

[–] [email protected] 110 points 5 days ago (12 children)

Well dont use chrom*

[–] [email protected] 64 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 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.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 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 4 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 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! 🤞

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 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.

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 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 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Thanks. I'll have a look at this!

Anti Commercial-AI license

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

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

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Yep, obviously, was just a joke. But technically, eg. steam is also chromium-based (which explains why it's shit)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

It's just a rat's tail like so many other things.

I miss opera with own engine

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

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

load more comments (8 replies)

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 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] 7 points 4 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 🤡

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

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

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 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. 🥰

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 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] 29 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 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] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 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] 39 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 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".

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I like how electron shit's "configurations" are also trash

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 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] 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

1GB of files is not configuration.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 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 4 days ago

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

load more comments