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.
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!
I really need work on better use of containers
When I use a computer for a few months my ~/ always gets so “messy”, I hate it!
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.