5 docs tagged with "clear-shared-caches"

Non-essential user-specific data is stored in "~/.var/app//cache" by Flatpak applications. This directory points to "XDGCACHEHOME" from the XDG base directory specification.

Application caches are isolated per application and stored in the "~/snaps/APP-NAME/VERSION/.cache" folders for Snap applications.

The "/var/cache" directory contains cached files, i.e. files that were generated and can be re-generated at any time, but they are worth storing to save time recomputing them. The application must be able to regenerate or restore the data, so the system can delete the contents of /var/cache either periodically or when its contents get too large. However, there is no guarantee that applications will follow the specification, but this is very rare. It's not only used by applications but also by th...

Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. Depending on the program that processes the thumbnails, the "icons" are usually located either in the "~/.cache/thumbnails/" folder (e.g., Nautilus from GNOME does this) or the "~/.thumbnails/" directory.

User-specific non-essential data is stored in "$XDGCACHEHOME", which defaults to "$HOME/.cache". Even though this data should be safe to delete, an application might still not comply with the standard and put anything in the cache folder, but this is very rare. This cache is used by both the operating system and different applications on it, e.g., used by KDE since v5.0, pip (Python package manager), or Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. Deleting this cache does not affect sandboxed ap...