Reminder to clear your ~/.cache folder every now and then

You don't have to clean your ~/.cache every now and then. You have to figure out which program eats so much space there, ensure that it is not misconfigured and file a bugreport.

That’s not very cache money of you

I did this and now my games have no icons in lutris, some of my gnome settings got reset and my proton email bridge stopped working

Even better: mount ~/.cache as ramfs. It will also speed up some apps significantly.

Because of excessive RAM I symlink ~/.cache to /tmp. Additionally installing zramswap helps for this scenario.

Benefits are faster access, automatc purging between reboots and no wear to the NMVe drive.

Yes, this is a single user scenario.

I don't think I've ever seen .cache get bigger than 10GB

Your Distro should normally do that for you.

Advising for this means people will delete random cache and download stuff always.

Are multiple files in there? If yes you could add a script that only deletes files of certain age.

Question, could you have cron/crontab do it monthly or something? Do it monthly meaning delete everything in ~/.cache every month or so?

No way. If i clean up my .cache directory my precious cached with sccache rust deps would be very upset. >:[

You can also setup a cron job to periodically clean oldest files for you.

Example: @weekly find ~/.cache -type f -mtime +7 -delete

This will delete everything older than 7 days inside your cache folder.

Doesn’t Steam store the game library there?

seems like a bug in one of rhe programs you're using.
modt software automatically manages it's cache...
are you using build caching tools such as Mozilla sccache? These tend to create 20gb+ cache directories, especially if used with debug builds

....yeah let me go check that...

13,574 totaling 1.7gb, not too bad. Hey OP how do you get to this view? It looks like we both use nautilus but when I select "properties" on the .cache folder it looks different.

du -sh ~/.cache/* | sort -h

NEVER

Is it safe to clear ~/.cache/mozilla/ while Firefox is running?

Check which folder is the biggest. I am going to go on a lim and say it probably is being caused by file roller

Bleachbit is good for clearing up some space

I just map both the user cache and the /tmp directory to a RAM drive. I allocated 4 GB but in practice it never gets even close to that much, and Linux seems to not be reserving the entire 4 GB at boot so I would assume how much RAM is used depends on how much is actually in your cache.

It also defers cache and tempfile related problems to turning it off and on again.

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.

add a second hard drive just for your cache

$ crontab -e

• • • */2 * rm -rf /home/lntl/.cache

This is why Linux sucks!

This is one of those things that makes me shake my head about Linux. It's these small dumb problems that make Linux inaccessible to the common person.