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.
So much this. It’s like these clowns don’t read the XDG directory spec and think
$XDG_CONFIG_HOMEand$XDG_DATA_HOMEare 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
$HOMEdotfile/dotdir or - somehow worse - those who put$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. :)
Well dont use chrom*
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
Better than dumping into ~/
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!
