As much as I want to argue that everything should be backed up, I realize that consumption devices would be a waste of time to backup if you are careful not to create any new data on them.
I have a couple of Linux Mint Debian Edition instances that I intentionally do not back up. I have Android devices (including Kindles) that I do not back up.
As long as the person is rigid in not creating data on the ‘disposable’ systems, I agree with you.
Insightful..!
Thanks for sharing..!
Probably a bit extreme but another approach worth mentioning is mounting ~/.cache as tmpfs. Instead of cleaning it periodically, you just let the OS handle it by wiping it on every reboot automatically.
You can do it by adding something like this to your /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /home/yourusername/.cache tmpfs noatime,nosuid,nodev,size=2G 0 0
The downside is you lose anything apps were persisting there across reboots, like font caches, thumbnail caches, or shader caches if you’re gaming.
Most apps rebuild their cache pretty quickly on first launch so it really depends on what you are running.