this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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/home is deprecated?
I was wondering about that too... According to the spec:
Sometimes home directories are in other locations. My University used to have different mount points for different graduating classes on our Unix servers. And I use "/home2" for one of my servers for... reasons.
Though I'm not sure that qualifies as "deprecated"? I get the "non-standard" bit though.
You also have to consider that roots homedir is in /root and not home, so if you'd just assume it's /home/$USER you'd get in trouble when your programm is run or compiled as root.
How about $HOME, is it standardized?
$HOME is a shell variable, created by the shell as it starts, reading from the /etc/passwd file. It's a string, not a symlink or anything.
I mean about the 'should query for it' part.
For the currently logged-in user it's fine, yes. It should always be set.
That's what I was wondering as well?
If so, what's the "correct" location to store stuff like documents, downloads, configurations, etc.?
In the user's home directory, which may or may not be in /home/username.
grep username /etc/passwd
will show you the home directory for a user. Also~username
from the CLI will resolve to that user's home directory. e.g.cp file.txt ~username/Documents/
So i checked the fhs. Doesn't say it is deprecated. V3 just mentions XDG and glib (the probable sources of such claims).
My best guess is that having programs treat a user's home directly as a location for things like config files is deprecated. Programs should be following the XDG standard instead.
You could contact the author (their email address is in the image), but I'm too lazy to do that.
The legend seems confusing to me. I think it's trying to say that
/home
is non-standard. Notice that the description for/var/run
explicitly states it's deprecated, and has a solid border.