Garrett: ext4, application expectations and power management

Does KDE recreate everything when you start it? I see no sign of this.
Indeed the ksycoca system takes exactly the approach you suggest,
*reading* all the KDE configuration (heaps of tiny files, some
in /usr/share, some in ~/.kde) ahd dumping it into a binary file
in /var/tmp for use by the KDE apps.

Regular rewriting of the configuration files certainly doesn't happen
after that, because KDE maintains inotify watches on all the configuration
files and reruns kbuildsycoca whenever they change. This takes several
seconds so you do *not* want to trigger it unnecessarily, by doing
pointless writes.

Looking at my KDE session now, only one process has any files under ~/.kde
open, and that's akregator and those are its archive files which are most
definitely *not* small files, nor rewritten constantly (they come to about
100Mb altogether).