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.
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 waygoddennis ritchie intended.