Are they any specific standards to keep the settings of an application for linux?

I'm planning on develop a java application to be cross platform. I find out that the settings of a mac application are usually kept in a file named info.plist. By looking for a similar file in my Ubuntu box I found that my applications create hidden folders in the home di开发者_如何学Pythonrectory. Is that the only standard?

Thats what they usually do (Dot.NameOfYourApplication).

In case your application uses a certain toolkit/desktop/framework, there maybe some specific location where such information is usually stored.

There is an effort by the (largely ignored, unfortunately) freedesktop.org group to standardize this across Linux desktops:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/config-spec

The references on that page, especially at the bottom, should give you some idea of the mess of this landscape.

Also that page is several years old, I believe. Don't hold your breath.

Basically, yes. Desktop environments have their own systems (gconf, Kconfig) and then there are various libraries for managing configuration. Elektra tries to be the ultimate solution, though I have not seen it to be used in practice.