Hello everyone,
We use Plasma 6.7 as our desktop environment in a Samba ADS environment (Univention UCS). The clients (Debian, Arch Linux) are members of the ADS. Users, groups, etc. are sourced from the ADS. When a user logs in, their home directory is mounted dynamically via NFSv4+Kerberos based on their username. The same applies to the other shares (SMB/CIFS).
The problem with the home directory is that Plasma also creates directories such as .cache within it. This makes sense with a local file system, but is not ideal with a remote file system. Are there any environment variables in Plasma (or Linux in general) that I can use to tell the client that it is working with a remote file system, so that it actually stores its caches etc. locally rather than on the NFS? Or how do others solve this problem?
with best
The ~/.cache directory is not specific to plasma. You can change it by setting XDG_CACHE_HOME.
See XDG Base Directory Specification for more information.
Thanks for clarifying that. I thought it was part of Plasma. It’s been two years now, and I’ve already tried using the XDG variables once, but the system simply ignored them. I’ll be happy to give it another go.
In that case, the Plasma project isn’t the right place for my query. Particularly when the Linux desktop is used in larger environments, it would be nice to have a central toggle that tells the system that the /home directory isn’t located on a local storage device, so that the system then automatically writes it to the local storage device. I’ll keep trying my luck 
If they were ignored it might have been because you set them in the wrong place. You probably want something that is system wide and applied to the session as a whole (~/.profile won’t work because it’s only read by the shell).
There once was a way to add environment scripts to plasma autostart which worked for this, but I don’t know how to do this in the current version.
In that case, the Plasma project isn’t the right place for my query.
It might be the right place to ask how to apply the evironment variables to the session.