There are thousands of configuration files on your computer. You may never directly interact with the bulk of them, but they’re scattered throughout your /etc folder and in ~/.config and ~/.local and /usr. There are probably some in /var and possibly even in /opt. If you’ve ever opened one by accident or to make a change, you may have wondered why some configuration files look one way while others look completely different.
Having mostly text config files is one of Linux’s great strengths as there is no single binary registry file to get corrupted, and secondly you can have a look at a text config file and sometimes fix what is broken, or even tweak some settings that you don’t find in menus for an application.
There are thousands of configuration files on your computer. You may never directly interact with the bulk of them, but they’re scattered throughout your /etc folder and in ~/.config and ~/.local and /usr. There are probably some in /var and possibly even in /opt. If you’ve ever opened one by accident or to make a change, you may have wondered why some configuration files look one way while others look completely different.