> As noted by Haelwenn /элвэн/, a plain 'du' will find such dotfiles. The problem is that plain 'du' is more or less useless for most people; to really take advantage of it, you have to know the right trick (not just the -h argument but feeding it to sort to find things). How I think most people use 'du' to find space hogs is they start in their home directory with 'du -s ' (or maybe 'du -hs ') and then they look at whatever big things show up. This will completely miss things in dot-directories in normal usage.

I don't understand. `du` indeed finds the dotfiles (and dot-folders); and if their contents are large, then they'll be noticed by someone who "looks at whatever big things show up". It's not at all clear to me why I'd be using a combination like `du -s *`.

Besides, there are more ways to hide the data from yourself (e.g. symlinking your desktop from somewhere else).

That said, I have found `ncdu` invaluable for navigating through the results, swapping between different views etc.

> And on Linux desktops, I believe that common GUI file browsers will omit dot-directories by default and may not even have a particularly accessible option to change that (this is certainly the behavior of Cinnamon's 'Files' application and I can't imagine that GNOME is different, considering their attitude).

"Cinnamon's 'Files' application" is Nemo, wherein you can right-click on any window and check the "show hidden files" option in the context menu (admittedly a strange placement, since it's a global setting).