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.

  • BrewchinEnglish
    35•21 days 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
      11•21 days 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.

      • BrewchinEnglish
        3•19 days ago

        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. 😊

        • @dan@upvote.au
          2•19 days ago

          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!

          • BrewchinEnglish
            2•19 days 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… 😬

    • DefederateLemmyMl
      7•21 days 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 BonesEnglish
        3•21 days 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•21 days 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.