I’ve seen similar issues in appdata on windows when a program is poorly configured and simply grow its logs to ridiculous sizes. It’s an issue with a program utilising that folder, not the os.
The hate you’re getting for this is so revealing and depressing. It basically proves you right.
To the haters: where is the factual problem with this personal opinion? Have you considered making a counter-argument instead, instead of simply lashing out with the downvote button like spoiled infants? This kind of tribal pile-on really pisses me off. You are literally censoring an opinion expressed in good faith - downvotes hide comments and reduce reputation. All while offering no rebuttal, no ideas of your own, nothing. Nice work.
It is what it is. I’ve been involved in Linux communities long enough to know not to take stuff like this personally.
On Reddit we saw constant posts about why Linux isn’t more popular but no one ever talks about all the dumb little issues that the distros have because of a slight lack of polish. Those little issues make the distros seem cheap compared to the polish of something like Windows.
I’m always amused at the replies I get with things like “When I had Windows it literally caused my CPU to burst in to flames and my SSD shot my dog. Now I’m running Arch and it showed me last night’s winning lotto numbers.”
And with your point here. In this world of pocket touchscreens and voice AIs, where young people don’t even know what a file is any more, the geeks here are reminding each other to empty their .cache directory from time to time. I mean, do they have no self-awareness? Or perhaps they simply don’t care if nobody chooses to use Linux. That at least would be coherent, but if there are no new users then eventually the whole thing will just die.
IMO I’d say the same thing about windows’s “Temp” folder though.
I agree that a lot of Linux isn’t user friendly but I’m also on a distro that is specifically supposed to be customized from the ground up (arch-based) using a tiling window manager which also involves configuring most things from the ground up. This isn’t a problem that most Linux users will likely have, but it is a problem that people may have if they are power users trying to have full control over their system (people who will be on a community about Linux). From what others in this thread have been saying, non-arch distros (and even arch with other aur helpers than yay) tend to have much smaller caches that get up to around 10Gb at most, which is also similar in size to what Windows’s temp directory uses.
This is a Linux community on a FOSS platform. This community is inherently going to be filled with more “geeky” people. Isn’t this what we signed up for? You make it seem like Linux was ever attracting people who weren’t these type of people to begin with. Computer science is still a growing field, and most sane computer science curriculums involve using POSIX terminal commands and by extension linux at some point. I’m a zoomer and can confirm, we’re not all as hopeless as you think we are. Linux will be fine even ignoring all of its corporate and government backing. And for people who don’t even know what a file is, they probably won’t know what Linux is in the first place. Even if they somehow have a system preconfigured with linux, their Ubuntu or Linux Mint install will probably be clearing the cache for them.
Some good points here, I stand partially corrected.
There are in fact 2 completely separate things that irk me. The biggest is the virtual lynching that is mass-downvoting. I’m sorry, I will never ever pardon the downvoting of opinions, I think it’s the illness of the social internet since the very beginning. See my many other recent comments for evidence of how strongly I feel about this.
The other issue is the actual one at hand! You’re right that this cache folder business does not really concern most ordinary users, even on Ubuntu. But actually, if even we geeks need to tell each other to “remember to do X every now and then”, I have enough of an IT mind to think “Why do we need to remember anything?! The tool should do this job for us!” These are “babysitting” chores and IMO on a decent OS there should be zero babysitting, it should be set up once and then it should work forever, with any tweaking optional.
Not a “hater” in terms of trying/wanting to be mean, but I do disagree. I think a lot of people downvoting are frustrated because this attitude takes an issue in one application (yay), for one distro, and says “this is why Linux sucks / can’t be used by normies”. Clearly that’s not true of this specific instance, especially given that yay is basically a developer tool. At best, “this is why yay sucks”. (yay is an AUR helper - a tool to help you compile and install software that’s completely unvetted - see the big red banner. Using the AUR is definitely one of those things that puts you well outside the realm of the “common person” already.)
Maybe the more charitable interpretation is “these kinds of issues are what common users face”, and that’s a better argument (setting aside the fact that this specific instance isn’t really part of that group). I think most people agree that there are stumbling blocks, and they want things to be easier for new users. But doom-y language like this, without concrete steps or ideas, doesn’t feel particularly helpful. And it can be frustrating – thus the downvotes.
Fair enough, tho personally I don’t see this “doom-y language” you see, I just see a slightly exasperated opinion expressed in good grammar and good faith.
But personally I don’t downvote people for their opinions, ever, as a matter of principle. It’s literally a form of censorship, given that it hides the comments. It leads straight to a deadening groupthink where dissenters are scared to open their virtual mouths. It creates a general aura of negativity and intolerance that helps nobody at all. Downvoting, as it is used by most people here and on the R-site, is an absolute scourge. If anything makes me leave this community, it will be this.
It ended up being yay storing binaries from previous versions of AUR packages, definitely depends on the distro/usage but for arch-based it definitely clears up a lot of storage
They do have small annoying issues. This is not one of them. This is something that would completely baffle a non-tech literate person. They’d just observe their computer becoming slow or not having space and say “well, Linux must have broken my computer.”
FYI, Windows doesn’t have any feature either to automatically clear all of it’s temp folders (%TMP%, C:\Windows\Temp, C:\Windows\Panther), plus several other folders where orphaned files are often leftover, such as C:\Windows\Installer, C:\Windows\CSC, and various folders and cache files in your AppData\Local etc, to name a few off the top of my head.
I used to be a Windows sysadmin for a long time, and let me tell you, HDDs becoming completely full due to cache/temp files is very much a problem in Windows.
If you’re talking about the Storage Sense feature - it sucks. It only clears a handful of well-known locations, but it doesn’t touch any of the orphaned content in C:\Windows\Installer, or the CSC or the old Panther folders from upgrades, not to mention several other files and folders in AppData. As I’ve said before, I’ve been a Windows sysadmin (until last year infact) managing over 20,000 devices, we’ve had Storage Sense on, but it’s been mostly useless - to the point that I ended up writing own cleanup script and set it to run before we pushed out a new Windows feature update, because otherwise we’d get several devices which failed to update due to the disk being full.
Guess what I found in /home/{user}/.wine/drive_c/users/{user}/Temp, 10GB of log files. Although 9GB was from one time when I used Cheat Engine and I don’t know what really happened tbh besides it causing a OOM crash.
It created a 9GB sized file called ADDRESSES.TMP, I never considered checking for temp files in .wine before. And I guess I should be checking all the prefixes created by Steam games as well…
I mean… I don’t think that’s common place. I’ve had the same Ubuntu install from 16.04 I think? All the way to 23.10 that I’ve migrated and upgraded from various laptops one to the other, and my ~/.cache folder is only 3.6gb out of a 1tb nvme drive.
I’ve never seen any of my ~/.cache directories get more than a few GB either and I never bother to clean them.
I am curious what OP was doing that used that much space though. That’s certainly not typical.
It was AUR packages from yay. I’m a CS major into gaming and emulation so there are a decent amount of programming build tools from the aur that I had, it looks like most of it is coming from storing all of the binaries from AUR packages, as intelliJ ultimate takes up 50 GiB, proton-ge-custom takes up 31 GiB, and Yuzu emulator takes up 16 GiB.
I get the same all the time. OP reminded me to check today and Jetbrains toolbox had cached a lot of downloads that took up 42 GB in total. yarn folder with 2.3 GB. bazel folder with 15 GB (apparently used for building Anki),7 GB paru clones.
Well, they're an Arch Linux user which is a special case. On Arch and derivatives it's the user's responsibility to manage the system so this doesn't happen, configure cleanup daemons, flush package managers, etc., alternatively it could also be a misbehaving application which would have to be reported. Arch is for hobbyists who likes to do this.
On other Linux distributions, Windows or macOS if this happens it's usually an application not properly managing its cache.
This particular folder caches many things from various package managers. Won’t hurt to clear, but will fill up again. Maybe consider not using caches when engaging such things.
Could have fooled me, because it’s certainly the default for things like brew, flatpak, mpm, and pip. Looks like npm and maven use it on certain Debian based distros as well. I’m betting more of the immutable distros use that directory as well vs something in /var/cache.
It’s a cache folder. Created by the distro. They labelled it as such because it’s cache, and can be considered ephemeral. It won’t do any permanent damage to anything unless you’ve accidentally been using it for something else.
Yes, that escape on spectacle is literally my workflow; I take a lot of screenshots and that change was the only thing I did not like about this newest Ubuntu update.
I love both. I can’t decide on which to make my full daily. GNOME sleek. KDE is nostalgic and customizable. I have Fedora with GNOME and OpenSuse with KDE. OpenSuse has issues with some SD cards and some phone’s flash memory. GNOME can’t have desktop shortcuts, which I find annoying. I may just go back to Debian with KDE and GNOME and switch back and forth. I think that still possible. I haven’t tried that in a while.
Sleek is a great way to describe GNOME. It’s really pretty and slick, and I was sure happy with how it worked. Plus, with all my google accounts hooked into GNOME, Evolution just pulled all that info and gave me real easy access to my mail. I wish KMail did the same thing.
I see the merit in it, but I see the desktop as a shortcut area for most used apps. Like the dock, but I can’t stand docks. I normally have 2-3 icons on the desktop. Terminal is by keyboard shortcut.
What would be great is they’d likely need to open source certain stuff for it to play nice with the kernel. Stuff like DirectX. And if that happens it’ll be a singularity moment for Linux compatibility and adoption.
I have at least 20 different devices that run some flavor of Linux. Servers, a laptop, TVs, AP/routers, probably more, if my other “smart” appliances run Linux also.
Do Android phones and tablets count towards Linux gaming?
PlayStations run a derivitive of BSD, maybe those should get honorable mention. ;)
Including phones would be significant. But in my (probably deranged) head android/linux is a different os from GNU/linux. The overlap of the kernel itself is not enough. In that case all switches/routers/storage appliances/toasters/washing machines/fridges/iot sensors often also run linux.
Linux can be used to play commercial games > more people daily drive to linux > more companies port their software to linux > even more people switch to linux > Windows/macOS duopoly breaks, losing to open source alternatives
I’m not saying playing call of duty on the deck will make windows fall, but it’s a start
The fluctuation in Simplified Chinese use makes me pretty suspect here. It was nearly cut in half in one month and suddenly 20% of Steam’s users that used Simplified Chinese just didn’t exist.
Honestly that big of a fluctuation in regional selection tells me none of the other data means anything.
If you are a Linux user and like commercial games, you probably would prefer them to work on Linux.
“Market share” on Linux aligns the vested interest of game makers and Linux game players. If the company thinks it can make money, it will do more to allow games to run, or at least do less to stop them.
There’s high potential overlap between the profile of a PC gamer (who is often also a PC builder and general computing DIY hobbyist) and an OS like Linux that extends your tinkering ability massively on the software side.
PC/laptop users are a shrinking demographic nowadays thanks to the advent of mobile devices, but they’re a high quality demographic made up of professionals and hobbyists with above average computer savvy. So lots of companies are trying to appeal to them because the choices they make in software and hardware can translate into many other IT fields.
These commercial, proprietary games are one of the things that pushes forward the capabilities of personal computers. They are unreasonable, unoptimized resource-hogs. If a Linux system is as capable of running them as a proprietary OS (that has a deck stacked in it’s favor), it means they lose one another advantage over Linux. And it also means that your hardware now is more productive at less bs tasks, especially consumer-grade nvidia cards, who are better supported now than years ago.
Been daily driving WSL Debian for about a year on my work laptop, without systemd and display server. At first, I was really only using it for application servers that just won’t run or too tedious to run on windows. But windows is just terrible for dev work that’s not part of windows eco system. So I found myself slowly moving most of my dev stuff to WSL. There are still some problems though.
Off the top of my head, first is neovim and the system clipboard. I can use clip.exe but there’s a problem with unicode characters. It’s expecting some UTF-16 encoding or something but my bash is in UTF-8. And somehow that messes up copying some unicode characters. I have to either use iconv to convert the encoding before copying or may be change my bash encoding.
Another recent problem I had is binding WSL ports to the window host’s network. WSL automatically binds the service ports to host window’s localhost with the same port number, which is pretty useful. But it only binds to localhost address. If you want it to bind to other addresses, you can’t configure it. You can to run some kind of a patch program someone wrote, that rebinds WSL ports the wildcard address. And it doesn’t work very well if the patch program’s version and your WSL’s versions are not compatible.
Another minor problem is that there’s some kind of a freeze that lasts for about a minute when I’m doing fzf in bash. It happens sporadically. I’m not entirely sure if the problem’s with Windows Terminal or WSL. It’s likely WSL. It seems to happen with other terminal emulators as well.
All in all, WSL makes having to be on windows a whole lot bearable. I’ll probably end up using only rudimentary UI apps on windows and move the rest to WSL.
You can install any general purpose distro (debian, opensuse or one of that others suggested) with a lighwwight DE (LXQT, Xfce, MATE) and it will work well. However when you run a browser and open several tabs with heavy websites it will become very slow. It does not matter what distro you use. You need 8G+ of RAM for comfortable web serfing nowadays.
I find it OK if you must use windows but it was fairly annoying to deal with and those annoyances are what got me to actually go for the whole Linux deal and I’m happy I switched.
Puppy Linux is mostly focused on tiny install size (<300MB), built from source and hasn’t had a new version in over 3 years.
Alpine is even more minimalist and designed to run on embedded devices or in containers.
Go with a desktop-oriented or general purpose distro instead.
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