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I know you said man pages are too technical but... man hier? https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/hier.7.html
/etc/skel
When a new user account is created, files from this
directory are usually copied into the user's home
directory.
Apparently "skel" is short for "skeleton", i.e. the skeleton for a new user home directory.
interesting! thank you
This is a pretty quick read with a bit of context for each entry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
(edit: similar content as man hier but with some more historical context and callouts to.other references)
One thing that's important to understand about Linux and its *NIX pedigree is its history of compromises later overcome by Moore's Law and its variants.
UNIX, its precursors, and its derivates has been around for something 50 or 55 years, essentially congealing in Bell Labs and evolving from there. It was conceived and developed when EVERYTHING about computing was expensive in both dollars, cycles and cooling. The zeitgeist of the era emphasized small, efficient operations that did one thing and did it well, reusing as Mich existing code as possible because storing anything extra was more expensive.
The filesystem itself is a study in value engineering, from economizing on the number of bytes in file paths (knowing linkers store that information in symbol tables) to optimizing system images to the most common storage media sizes of the day. The evolution of /bin, /lib, /etc, /sbin, /usr/* and even /home are just interesting reads if you're into deep lore and arcana.
Hope you have fun exploring it, its a dying body of knowledge
For more context, those UNIX would run on machines that were the size of a large room, if not an entire floor.
And you'd input and get output on a TeleTYpewriter. The video terminals came later. Sometimes you'd dial into them over 300 baud modem. Even just ls / could take a significant amount of time to output if the names were super long, let alone the paper and ink ribbon consumption. And you'd be lucky to even have 80 column output, you'd often have 40 or even less.
DOS came two decades later and still had that 8.3 format because you'd use 5¼ floppies with 320k of space.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but for an understanding of the general directory structure in Linux, you might want to have a look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS 3.0). It defines which directories need to exist and what they are supposed to contain. Also, it's a rather light read and not awfully technical.
If you want more of a deeper dive, you might want to get a book that can be used in preparation for an LPIC-1-certification, even if you never intend to take the actual test. I found that they do a really good job at teaching not just the user perspective of Linux (type this to do that), but also the reasoning behind why Linux works the way it does.
Regarding /etc/skel being an empty directory, note that it is one of the few places outside /home where you can actually expect hidden files :) On my Arch it contains Bash dotfiles, for example.
ahhhh. ls -a reveals its true contents. thank you!
The default files for each new user are stored in this directory. Each time a new user is added, these skeleton files are copied into their home directory. An average system would have: .alias, .bash_profile, .bashrc and .cshrc files. Other files are left up to the system administrator
https://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/etc.html
This video is useful
interesting video thanks. Didn't realize etc was Editable Text Configurations, thought it meant etc, as in et cetera
It could be both!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/42iQKuQodW4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Not sure it helps with /etc/skel (never heard of it before) but this is a cool infographic: https://whimsical.com/fhs-L6iL5t8kBtCFzAQywZyP4X