n0tinventedhere

>It is meant for persistent user configuration, possibly generated by the app - the type you might want to back up. You are not supposed to understand or be able to read every file in there, just be able to know the usage.

I understand your point, but there is a lot more going on than just "configuration that isn't human readable" unfortunately.

> (Google stuffs shader caches in there it seems?)

They also stuff web storage.

And despite their misuses of .config they also still pollute the root $HOME by creating $HOME/.pki. Deleting the folder and restarting Chrome will always create this thing.

I find it easier to exclude all .* from the rsync I do to synchronize documents/data etc, and exclusively manage the dotfiles through another program, homeshick, where instead of making exclusions, I make explicit inclusions. The config files I care about are far, far fewer in numbers than the random crap programs spew in dot folders.

I like the XDG specs, but even programs that pretend to follow it don't follow it. CMUS, a music player, moved into ~/.config.. moved everything, including files that belong to .cache and .local/state. Google Chrome has 999 mb worth of files in its .config folder on my computer. The truth of the matter is that XDG only managed to encourage developers to move their files away from the root of $HOME but they didn't manage to make people respect a proper hierarchy of files.

> - ~/.config/foo -- only you write files here, so it's your detritus, not the program's :)

That's not true.

> ls ~/.config/cef_user_data/Dictionaries

> en-US-9-0.bdic

That's a dictionary file written in a binary format. I don't even know what program wrote this crap there, only that it's embedding chrome (CEF).

> ls ~/.config/ibus/bus/

> dcf58003d1744e71aa86dd97e951d49d-unix-0 dcf58003d1744e71aa86dd97e951d49d-unix-1 dcf58003d1744e71aa86dd97e951d49d-unix-wayland-0

Files describing how to do IPC with current processes. They belong to ~/.local/state not .config.

This time, I won't even try to make a judgement as to what is "my detritus" as opposed to the program's because there are too many files involved, and will just show how much they occupy on my drive despite being in .config when 90% of them really ought to be in .local/share and .cache

> cd ~/.config/google-chrome

> du -h

> 999M .

Ahem. I think the idealism toward the XDG spec has not panned out.

By the way, Chrome does have folders in .cache :

> cd ~/.cache/google-chrome

> du -h

> 651M .

But, I believe it doesn't put "local storage" stuff from webapps there.

It doesn't use ~/.local at all.

~/.config is broken beyond belief and not the place where you just have "your config files".

The only sane way to manage "your config files" is to put them in a git managed folder and use a symlink farm program.

I agree with you there. I don't remember which it was, but one of the runtimes managers (was it pyenv, rvm or nvm?) wrote to my .bashrc and .zshrc without asking for permission to do so, instead of just telling me the locations it wants me to include in my $PATH. I don't do path munging in my zshrc, rather, I source a different file that I use to manage this stuff and set up a way to avoid duplicates in $PATH and only adding things to $PATH when they exist so that my shell configuration doesn't do anything dumb when used across multiple computers.

Well, I'd rather their attempt at writing to my shell config breaks.

This is one of the many reasons why you should, if you haven't yet, manage your dotfiles with version control. Many tools assist in giving you some sugar over the process, I use homeshick which will move files away into a git controlled folder and create symlinks.

I live in France, and WhatsApp has a pretty big presence. Not a monopoly style one though, there's plenty of other apps used: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, Discord.. I have friends who have family in other countries and some different apps will be dominant, like Viber, but the common theme is that the only time I've seen people use SMS is when they're unsure as to whether the other person has any other means of communication. Most importantly, I've never seen someone use Google's own non-RCS chat apps, like Google Chat, Google Hangout, Google Allo, Google Talk.. Google has had many chat apps, sometimes just different names for the same thing, but in the end, they have no users here. Google continuously tried to make a dent in that market and failed.

RCS is a non-starter if you need to do group chats with iPhone users or send them pictures without a massive loss in quality, as iPhones do not support RCS. As long as Apple refuses to support it, it will continue being a terrible choice in any country with significant Apple user base. An Android user with WhatsApp shares an identical experience with an iPhone user with WhatsApp. RCS on the other hand will drop you back to what cell phone messaging was many decades ago.

I didn't have websites outright breaking on FF like solardev, but I had other issues with it, like cloudflare getting me into an infinite loop of asking me if I'm human and not letting me browse the website. This happened even if I deleted my firefox profile and started fresh with no extension. Note that this behavior of Cloudflare is highly dependent on the settings of their anti-ddos stuff, some websites have it set on a higher level of defensive behavior than others, I didn't have this issue everywhere.

This wasn't due to my computer's IP, the problem went away the moment I browsed the same website with Chrome, and this time I wasn't even asked to click the checkbox to prove that I'm human.

I find it amazing how people forget that being a monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks: Google has, time and time again, failed to gain traction in the messaging app market on Android, the market being entirely occupied by competitors like WhatsApp.

Chrome won partly because of the marketing and being preinstalled, sure, but also by being a good product. If nagging people to install Chrome was all it took to win, then why is Edge in such a precarious position on Windows with all the nagging Windows 10 and 11 brought? Microsoft failed to succeed time and time again.

People on HN have weird preconceptions about how suggestion and marketing works.

> so Firefox is faster than chrome

Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame).

The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.

I can tell you from doing testing on Edge back when it represented a potential third engine to support: that browser crashed a lot. It was very unreliable prior to switching to becoming another chromium fork. It is clear the dev team was either underfunded or plain incompetent and Microsoft was in dire need of a default browser that didn't make people wince, ASAP, they could not afford to wait [insert X years to get a mature engine] so they went the obvious route and chose to make a chromium fork.

Making a reliable engine that supports all of the modern web is a monstrous undertaking. Not just "support", it needs to be reliable. Microsoft missed the boat when they allowed IE to rot and it was too late to catch up now. Every year spent without a reliable browser preinstalled on your OS is detrimental.

Gnome always had this problem of spreading thin instead of focusing. Lots of little tiny irrelevant apps just to have something to stamp a Gnome branding on. But even people who are really hardcore about using a Gnome desktop don't use those apps.

I've never met a single person who uses Gnome Web (Epiphany) instead of Chrome/Firefox/Brave/Vivaldi/whatever. Or Totem (instead of mplayer, mpv and its various frontends, or VLC). Or Boxes instead of virt-manager. Or gedit (instead of the trillion text editors that exist on Linux. The thing the platform lacks the least? Text editors.). Oh wait, it's not gedit anymore, they wrote a new one from scratch called "Text Editor".