Comment 2 for bug 58502

I agree that the default of zero is an unpleasant surprise. Under Fedora, I was accustomed to putting things of little value - temporary files, like software downloads or one-off test cases - in /tmp; it was fine that they got deleted after a month or so because by then I would have forgotten about them. Under Ubuntu, now any time my computer crashes (a pretty frequent occurrence, since it's a laptop), all of that is gone. Not a huge loss but certainly an annoyance. Given that most users have much more disk space than they can use, it seems unlikely that keeping /tmp files for a few days would harm anyone - and given that this is a boot job, not a cron job as in Fedora, and desktop systems could be running indefinitely without a reboot, that does not seem to be a primary motivation anyway.

This could also be seen as the "root cause" of Bug #15179, that Firefox downloads get nixed after a reboot without warning; although in that case it seems that some novice Unix users did not realize that /tmp was not for long-term storage of files and were putting valuable data (e.g. OOo documents) there.

Is there nowhere in the desktop preferences GUI to configure TMPTIME? I had some difficulty finding this setting; I had to read through bootclean to find it.