A Tour of the Filesystem
Linux has no drive letters (no C:). Everything hangs off a single root, /, in one big tree.
Analogy: Think of/as the trunk of a tree./home,/etc,/varare big branches; your files are the leaves. A USB stick or second disk gets grafted onto a branch ("mounted") rather than becoming a separateD:drive.
The layout is standardized (the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard), so these directories mean the same thing on every distro:
| Directory | Holds | Remember it as |
|---|---|---|
/home | User files (/home/you) | Your stuff |
/etc | System configuration | The settings |
/var | Logs, mail, caches | Things that grow |
/bin, /usr/bin | Programs | The apps |
/tmp | Temporary files | The scratchpad |
/dev | Devices (disks, terminals) | The hardware |
/proc, /sys | Live kernel info | The dashboard |
$ ls /
bin boot dev etc home lib proc root tmp usr var
$ cat /etc/os-release | head -1
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 22.04 LTS"Tip: When something breaks, muscle memory should say: config →/etc, logs →/var/log. Those two facts solve a huge share of real incidents.
Explore below: ls /, ls /etc | head, and cat /etc/os-release.