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.

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
      38·
      3 months ago

      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

    • Lucy :3@feddit.org
      9·
      3 months ago

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

      • IceFoxX@lemm.ee
        71·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • Lucy :3@feddit.org
          8·
          3 months ago

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

          • IceFoxX@lemm.ee
            5·
            3 months ago

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

            I miss opera with own engine

            • macniel@feddit.org
              3·
              3 months ago

              Presto was nice. But I guess being quite strict about standards was just too much to handle for the chrome fanboy developers.

          • HStone32@lemmy.world
            5·
            3 months ago

            Valve has proven they will go to great lengths to utterly thwart would-be monopolies that threaten PC gaming (the real reason proton exists). We just need to find a way to convince them that Google is a threat too.

            • Lucy :3@feddit.org
              3·
              3 months ago

              I just want better APIs. Users will do the rest. A native client, still steam-style, but made in QT. Maybe not the store etc., but display that via an external browser or inline firefox somehow.

    • Engywook@lemm.ee
      214·
      3 months ago

      Firefox saves its config outside of .config/ as well, IIRC. Can’t check now, I have actually put that crappy browser in the trash bin long ago.

        • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          3 months ago

          Usually the shit-talkers use some fork of FF that would last about 5 minutes if FF ceased to exist.

          Or fucking Brave, the cryptoscam browser.

      • unhrpetby@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Yes. ~/.mozilla. Its annoying.

        You can fix it with a hack by putting a shell script in your path (before the original firefox) that consist of:

        #!/bin/sh

HOME='/home/engywuck/.local/share/firefox' /usr/bin/firefox

        Call that instead of the original firefox from now on. it will create the “librewolf” folder in ~/.local/share and chuck its junk in there.

        Edit: This bug has been open for TWENTY YEARS.

        Honestly ridiculous.

        • Wilmo Bones@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Thats because flatpaks treat each apps directory as their own $HOME so instead of $HOME/.mozilla its $HOME/.var/app/{app_name}/.mozilla

          Which is still fantastic dont get me wrong. But Mozilla hasn’t stopped hardcoding their Mozilla folder instead of the xdg dirs even throughf firefox issue tracker has had it on there for 20 years

    • renzev@lemmy.world
      131·
      3 months 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!

  • Brewchin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    3 months ago

    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. :)

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
      6·
      3 months ago

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

      Well, Firefox is pretty special 🤡

      • Wilmo Bones@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

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

    • renzev@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 months 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.

  • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    27·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • coherent_domain@infosec.pubEnglish
      112·
      3 months ago

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

      • Wrrzag@lemmy.ml
        35·
        3 months ago

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

        • coherent_domain@infosec.pubEnglish
          11·
          3 months ago

          Okay I prefer to use FDE for security, especially on laptops, so my data recovery is never going to be trivial, yet with a live environment, also not too difficult.

      • kevincox@lemmy.ml
        5·
        3 months ago

        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”.

          • PoolloverNathan@programming.devEnglish
            6·
            3 months ago

            The point is that many programs completely ignore .cache’s existence — when programs do actually use it, adding a backup exception is trivial, but having to manually find what’s actually cache in .config (or, even worse, finding one SQLite database with the config and cache) complicates it.

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        3 months 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.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    21·
    3 months ago

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

    • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      21·
      3 months ago

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

      • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Ohhh okay, this is what the answer I was looking for.

    • qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      Yes mostly Java and Kotlin with a combination of Java Swing and Compose for the GUI afaik

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      It’s Java but don’t be afraid, nowadays it also runs a chromium browser for your Markdown needs! a few years earlier it was done without that, but if course they had to fuck that up

  • srestegosaurio@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    18·
    3 months ago

    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@lemmy.world
      9·
      3 months 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.

  • dev_null@lemmy.ml
    4·
    3 months ago

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