Can unused files be deleted from./config?

[BluishHumility]

@Colin

Some of these files relate to Chromium based browsers I had previously installed but are no longer present (i.e. Brave, Thorium and Vivaldi) and they are taking up 1.3GB of SSD space.

Will it cause any issues if I delete these files?

It is safe to delete these files. If you decide at some point to use any of these browsers again, your settings will be lost and it will be as if you had opened the browser for the first time.

@Colin

Remove unused packages (orphans):
    Use the pacman package manager to remove orphaned packages. Orphaned packages are packages that were installed as dependencies but are no longer needed by any other package.
    Run the following command to remove orphaned packages: sudo pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qdtq) 

You can remove orphans to free up space, but the -Rns option can be overly aggressive; see also this discussion here: Discussion about handling orphaned packages - #6 by BluishHumility

@Colin

For example, to delete all .conf files in the /config directory, run: find /etc -name "*.conf" -type f -delete.

Do not run this command!

The command the chat bot has suggested you run will remove all files that end in .conf from the /etc directory. These are important files in an important directory. Running this command will break your system. This should be considered bad advice.

There is no /config directory, by the way. User configs are stored in the ~/.config directory.

@Colin

To clean the cache in your home directory: rm -rf ~/.cache/*

Deleting cache is not without consequences. For example, if you delete all your yay or paru cache you won’t see diffs properly when updating AUR packages. Depending on how much space is tied up there, it may not be worth messing with it.

TL;DR: yes, you can delete configs from ~/.config for applications you don’t use anymore, but be careful.