I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
Start your application / program with “strace” and see all the files it opens.
Also run “lsof” on a running process to see what files it has open.
I doubt that’s a linux problem. All apps store config in /etc, ~/.*rc or ~/.config
Everything else should be considered a bug (looking at you, systemd!)