4mo ago

XDG_CONFIG_HOME

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.

85 comments

Well dont use chrom*
- I use ungoogled chromium, but only for sites that absolutelly don'y wanna work on firefox.
  
  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.
  
  Same but I use Cromite or i try using a electron app (like heroic) on my pc.
- 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
  
  There already is one called Flare. It uses rust IIRC.
- Well you do use files named chrome.css, as Firefox based browsers have their style css in that.
  
  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.
  
  Fun fact: Unrelated to the browser of the same name, it's the "window chrome" of the browser
- Chrom, grant me my RAM....and if you do not listen, then the hell with you!
- 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.
  
  I will not take this bait
  
  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.
  
  And what browser are you using?
  
  For what it is worth the Flatpak version doesn't have this issue
Better than dumping into ~/
- I don't get why so many programs do this. This is ridiculous
  
  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.
- 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!
- When I use a computer for a few months my ~/ always gets so “messy”, I hate it!
- I really need work on better use of containers
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. :)
- 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.
  
  I was thinking more of one product companies using a $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Boop Snoot Partners, Inc/<Software Name You Remember Installing>/ convention, which seems to be the norm inside %APPDATA%.
  But I take your point. 😊
- Never mind developers who, in 2025, still think their project is special enough for a $HOME dotfile/dotdir
  Well, Firefox is pretty special 🤡
  
  This is why I use flatpaks. Keeps most of the offending the dotfiles in .var directory scoped to the app itself
- 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.
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.
- Why is separating the OS with files necessary? I don't think large files slows down the OS anymore, because of SSD.
  
  Because it makes reinstalls really easy. You can just nuke your OS but everything else remains there safely.
  
  It's not necessary, just really convenient when your OS breaks
  
  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".
  
  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.
- Run containers and VMs. You have way more control.
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. 🥰
- 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.
IntelliJ IDEA runs on a jvm right not a electron app??
- I think it might still be dropping executables in .config, stuff like the JDK or even its own software versions
  
  Ohhh okay, this is what the answer I was looking for.
- Yes mostly Java and Kotlin with a combination of Java Swing and Compose for the GUI afaik
- 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
  
  Ohhh
I like how electron shit's "configurations" are also trash
- You'd think they would do better. Isn't that part of the point of using Electron?
Apps I write put config files in XDG_CONFIG_HOME/appname/, which is usually ~/.config/appname/. What's wrong with that?
- 1GB of files is not configuration.
  
  Oh I see, the problem is misusing it for stuff that isn't configuration, yeah that makes sense now.
- Thats how its supposed to be, but if your config dir is tens of megabytes large, you're doing something wrong

85 comments