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XDG_CONFIG_HOME (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by alyth@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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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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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 38 points 3 months ago

Better than dumping into ~/

[-] pewpew@feddit.it 12 points 3 months ago

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

[-] dan@upvote.au 5 points 3 months 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.

[-] renzev@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 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!

[-] benjaminb@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 months ago

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

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago

I really need work on better use of containers

[-] Brewchin@lemmy.world 33 points 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. :)

[-] dan@upvote.au 10 points 3 months ago

Windows developers trying to follow best-practice-like-Microsoft-does

I think the best practices on Windows are pretty similar to Linux, other than Windows usually using title case whereas Linux usually using lowercase. There's bad developers on both platforms :)

Windows equivalent to XDG_CONFIG_DIR is %appdata%, which is the roaming AppData directory.

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[-] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 6 points 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@lemmy.world 3 points 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 points 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.

[-] IceFoxX@lemm.ee 27 points 3 months ago

Well dont use chrom*

[-] crony@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz 14 points 3 months ago

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

[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 15 points 3 months ago

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@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] toebhi@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 months ago

This always happens to me. How can one get around that (without using chrom*)

[-] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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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[-] Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago

Firefox doesnt support web serial.

[-] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

Oh yeah that reminds me, to use the Graphene web installer, you need chrome. To revert to factory, chrome.

[-] Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, also to flash wled, meshtastic, esphome. Of course they can be done via terminal, but you get what I mean.

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[-] devfuuu@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

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.

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[-] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I haven't had a website not work with Firefox for a long time.

Me too...mostly? But the cases I've seen or encountered are always government, financial, education, or medical websites with some super-bespoke "portal" that will simply act bizarre on Firefox.

It really sucks that it seems so common to just glance at some "market-share" data and, not just assume everybody must use Chrome, but go so far as to force them to.

[-] benjaminb@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I actually use chromium to do watch party’s. As you can disable hardware acceleration and for some reason the Netflix DRM doesn’t work anymore. (So I can stream the video to friends on dc)

But otherwise I never had problems with Firefox.

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[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 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

[-] yonder@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 months ago

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

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago

Thanks. I'll have a look at this!

Anti Commercial-AI license

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[-] srestegosaurio@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 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 11 points 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.

[-] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 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.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago

Run containers and VMs. You have way more control.

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[-] projjalm@lemy.lol 4 points 3 months ago

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

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago

You'd think they would do better. Isn't that part of the point of using Electron?

[-] Mwa@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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

[-] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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

[-] qaz@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

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

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[-] dev_null@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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

[-] expr@programming.dev 13 points 3 months ago

1GB of files is not configuration.

[-] dev_null@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

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

[-] zaubentrucker@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 months ago

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

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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
181 points (97.9% liked)

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