Done!

I’d be more than happy if this was used. Do whatever you want with it as long as you abide by the CC BY-SA-4.0 license. This means you can share freely and modify as long as you keep the authorship information and share with same license.

The FHS was started in 1994 and is free to use. It should be used now by all major Linux systems and most Unix too.

The only credit is to the Linux Foundation.

You leave NixOS alone!!

I profess my ACAB creed by having directories like /ssd, /hdd, /backups

ikr? NixOS is particularly bad

it bothers me a little the entry is not called fhs: man fhs

Added to new version. Thanks for the suggestion.

I just mount mine into /mnt and bind mount subdirectories from them into wherever I need the space.

Edit: if you want a more theoretically correct location according to the FHS you could mount drives somewhere under /run and bind their contents from there. I’ve done that before as well.

tbh I don’t think it matters, so wherever you feel like doing it. I just leave it where the distro or file manager defaults to: in Ubuntu-based distros that’s /media/$USER/mount-name. For mounts shared across users you could drop the $USER.

Since FHS doesn’t specify where “non-removable media” should go, I don’t think it makes sense to adopt this recommendation as /media should be removable, but rather, “in case the media IS removable, then mount it to /media/”.

If they are internal and permanent (read: unlikely to be removed on a daily basis), I’d just mount them based on their purpose and not them being separate HDDs physically. If they are meant for logs, mount them at /var/log. If they are meant for your movies, /home/user/data is more than fine. In general FHS describes the directory hierarchy, not which parts of it are mountpoints and which are physically on the same media. Technically you’re fine having each and every directory on a separate HDD.

I’m also mounting them into /home/user/data while I don’t think hard-coding the user name in the mountpoint is a good idea. Besides, it needs the assumption that I’m the only “human-user” of this computer.

I may also mount them at /opt/data, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea

I’m coming more from a server perspective but, fundamentally, all HDDs are “temporary”. Eventually that data might be in a bigger/faster/functioning replacement - so it’s best to treat the drive as something which can always be replaced.

Continuing that, you might mount to /mnt and then symlink that where you really want it, say …/games. That layer of abstraction allows you to replace the drive without much effect on install. Also allows for expansion via something like mergerfs (*no idea if that’s a good idea for your use cases)

I originally had mine mounted on /, to make them easy to type. But that set one of my highly opinionated friends wretching, so I re-mounted them to /media// to placate him and symlinked them to my home directory instead.

It’s frustrating how often Linux systems, when approached with a “where is the canonical location for ?” question, have an answer ancient use cases practically no one has anymore, but no satisfying answer for extremely common use cases like permanently mounted backup drives, where to put web server hosted files, or even where to install applications that don’t come from package managers (/opt/? /usr/bin/? /home//.local/?).

If it’s just personal files and backups, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with what you’re doing.

If you had, say, active system config files there, it would make things… complicated to say the least.

Not sure if this is proper procedure since I searched around and didn’t find much, but I’ve got an internal drive just for games mounted at /home/games. Haven’t had any issues so far.

Usb devices are nowadays when connected mounted somewhere in /run/%user

Added a black background version.

You could invert the colors in GIMP or similar.

deleted by creator

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

/home is not deprecated, it’s optional but common. Here is the section from FHS: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s08.html

I guess the reason it’s not in FHS is that FHS is concerned about system wide things whereas /home is the opposite. It’s the user’s realm.

There is XDG for /home/$user though.

The better you understand it the less it seems bad.

Depends on the scope of your project. But if they are services for example or you want them to be run by different users on the system, you could either use /opt or /usr/local. There is some discussion about which is better or how to choose: eg. https://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/pointcounterpoint-opt-vs-usrlocal . The FHS is mostly relevant when packaging your software though.

Thanks for the input. Things are complicated: https://askubuntu.com/a/135679 . Apparently it originally meant “user” but then slowly was used for system stuff. So people invented backcronyms.

That’s just retconning/backronyming it.

/usr does historically stand for user. It’s where the user home directories were on old Unix versions.

does guix go the same was as nixos in that regard? where can I find info regarding FHS in guix?

FHS? Who needs that?

well nix still uses the same structure, the only difference is that files are symlinked to files in subfolders of the /nix/store folder.

For example you may find that /etc/hosts is just a symlink to /nix/store/69420aaabbbcccdddfffggghhhiii420-hosts

“Local” in this context means local to this whole machine. From the perspective of a single user, it’s system-wide. But then from the perspective of a sysadmin managing dozens of such systems, it’s local.

Many FHS things don’t make much sense for single-user (human user) systems on modern hardware. /usr/local does though. It’s for you (as admin) to install software that doesn’t come with the os.