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.
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.
For .config it 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 .config in a git repo, and storing full history for large and frequently changing files is a waste of space if they aren't really "config".