Then you have a whitelist which is clearly not that hard to maintain
For the cache, the opposite argument is just as true:
If I want to clear cache from everything to save space, I can just `rm -rf ~/.cache` instead. And this case is a lot more common than wanting to "start from a clean profile" :/
But can you? Did you really close all the apps using ~/.cache? What if some app is just doing some cleanup operation, moves a bunch of stuff to cache, and the files are missing now? Did you just delete android studio cache in the middle of a compile?
You can also make a script like your .config, but it's called "clear_cache.sh", where you hardcore a few paths you usually clean manually.
Programs that cannot deal with removing ~/.cache at any point are simply faulty because at that point it is state and not cache which by definition can be recreated at the point of access.
That was a bit exaggerated I never clean fully the cache, mostly just specific apps but as long as I have everything closed (GUI and CLI apps), I don't really care what background services are doing and if they get upset because of this. I'm not on a server, that's my laptop so there is no critical stuff going on and once the app I use are closed that's good enough
```
*
!nvim/
!dunst/
!i3/
```
Then you have a whitelist which is clearly not that hard to maintain
For the cache, the opposite argument is just as true:
If I want to clear cache from everything to save space, I can just `rm -rf ~/.cache` instead. And this case is a lot more common than wanting to "start from a clean profile" :/