Now that so many distros upgrade in place and don’t require clean installs as much, I been noticing some of my KDE installs have some rather old files in ~/.cache/*
When KDE undergoes a big upgrade, like from 6.6.5 to 6.7.0, should the ~/.cache/ folder contents be cleared out by the admin before the newly updated KDE is started? This way the new KDE would repopulate the .cache with fresh files from its own context instead of reading files from some very old KDE version that was still there.
You can clear the cache safely, and not just when updating.
I know I can, but is there a benefit from it?
If I was on KDE X and then upgraded to X+1, but just left the stale ~/.cache folder as it was, is KDE X+1 going to deal robustly if it runs across some ancient file dumped in there from some long gone KDE? Or even better, does KDE have some kind of way of flushing stale cached files intelligently?
BTW, I always log out of the KDE desktop, then upgrade KDE from a text console (ctrl+alt+F4 for example to run the dnf upgrade from the kmscon console so KDE isn’t running with the possible exception of plasmalogin.).
The only circumstance related to updating where I’m certain clearing the cache is beneficial is after an update on a distro where Plasma is built from git, like openSUSE Krypton. It is in fact a hard requirement there. After normal distro updates it’s not AFAIK.
i don’t think old files in /.cache are an issue, but you can clear it any time things don’t fell right… it’s usually my first act along with a reboot.
if an X+1 version can’t use the old cache for some reason it will just write a new one of it’s own and then the old one will get cleared out the next time you delete the cache.