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.
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.
Run containers and VMs. You have way more control.
Why is separating the OS with files necessary? I don’t think large files slows down the OS anymore, because of SSD.
I use an SSD for the OS, on my Windows rig a 128gb drive. For files I use mainly hard drives and/or other SSDs for programs.
For
.configit isn’t as important to me, but putting things that can be re-created in.cache(well the proper environment variable that defaults to.cache) is very nice because I don’t need to back up all of that junk.But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to put something like
.configin a git repo, and storing full history for large and frequently changing files is a waste of space if they aren’t really “config”.You could just add an exception to not backup .cache
The point is that many programs completely ignore
.cache’s existence — when programs do actually use it, adding a backup exception is trivial, but having to manually find what’s actually cache in.config(or, even worse, finding one SQLite database with the config and cache) complicates it.It’s not necessary, just really convenient when your OS breaks
Okay I prefer to use FDE for security, especially on laptops, so my data recovery is never going to be trivial, yet with a live environment, also not too difficult.
Because it makes reinstalls really easy. You can just nuke your OS but everything else remains there safely.