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Comment by quicklime | Hacker News Reader

Does it really help that much in practice?

> Easier to share configuration settings

I want to share my nvim config between both my home Linux machine and my Mac at work, but I don’t want to share my config for gnome and its apps. So now I’ve got to maintain a script to go one more subdirectory deep to pick which dotfiles to sync and which to ignore...

> Easier to temporarily ignore the config > It is easiest to set XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp/dir

This is such an unreliable way to do it, even within the xdg world. What about stuff in ~/.local/share? It’s a lot easier and more reliable to just set HOME=$(mktemp -d)

Personally when I’m trying to start from a clean profile, I find it much easier to just go and blow away ~/.mozilla than to go and surgically remove .config/epiphany, .local/share/epiphany, .cache/epiphany, and whatever gconf (or gsettings or whatever windows registry clone we’ve got now) settings it’s got.

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> Easier to create backups

i want to mess up with wine, now I just backup ~/.wine, do whatever, restore.

With split folders, i'd have to backup a bunch of folders (.config/wine, .local/share/wine, .local/lib/wine or wherever the files, registry, dosdevices and other stuff would be put).

  find ~ -type d -name "?wine" -exec cp -r "{}" /path/to/my/wine/backup/ \;

> i want to mess up with wine, now I just backup ~/.wine, do whatever, restore.

You can set WINEPREFIX to use a non-default prefix path (other than `~/.wine`).

Note that the prefix doesn't contain everything that wine spills all over your home. It adds (XDG `.desktop`) launchers & menu/desktop shortcuts, file type associations, icons, etc. to the usual locations.

Usually I need to upgrade something within a wine environment, and sometimes the new version of whatever software doesn't work, so "cp -r .wine .wine-bak", do whatever, fail, rm, cp back, and it's done.

.gitignore in $HOME/.config:

```

!nvim/

!dunst/

!i3/

```

Then you have a whitelist which is clearly not that hard to maintain

For the cache, the opposite argument is just as true:

If I want to clear cache from everything to save space, I can just `rm -rf ~/.cache` instead. And this case is a lot more common than wanting to "start from a clean profile" :/

> I can just `rm -rf ~/.cache

But can you? Did you really close all the apps using ~/.cache? What if some app is just doing some cleanup operation, moves a bunch of stuff to cache, and the files are missing now? Did you just delete android studio cache in the middle of a compile?

You can also make a script like your .config, but it's called "clear_cache.sh", where you hardcore a few paths you usually clean manually.

That was a bit exaggerated I never clean fully the cache, mostly just specific apps but as long as I have everything closed (GUI and CLI apps), I don't really care what background services are doing and if they get upset because of this. I'm not on a server, that's my laptop so there is no critical stuff going on and once the app I use are closed that's good enough

Programs that cannot deal with removing ~/.cache at any point are simply faulty because at that point it is state and not cache which by definition can be recreated at the point of access.

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