this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025

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XDG_CONFIG_HOME (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

76 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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[–] [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. 🥰

[–] [email protected] 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] 33 points 2 days ago (3 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 1 day 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 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

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

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. 😊

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

I see that in some cases on Linux, for example JetBrains IDEs use paths like $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/JetBrains/Rider2024.1. I agree that it's more common on Windows though!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I don't mind it with companies that produce multiple products, as nesting them does make sense.

But for one-hit-wonders it's a bit... 😬

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Better than dumping into ~/

[–] [email protected] 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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 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 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] 110 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Well dont use chrom*

[–] onlinepersona 46 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 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 (5 children)

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

[–] onlinepersona 6 points 2 days ago

Thanks. I'll have a look at this!

Anti Commercial-AI license

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 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] 12 points 2 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.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day 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 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] 8 points 2 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 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (9 children)

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

[–] Hexarei 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] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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

[–] expr 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

1GB of files is not configuration.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (9 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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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