Why do some progs install to /home by default? e.g Wine, Amule etc...

[cantagril]

Moi again.

OK, so lots things are going right with my new LL installation -  n°5 in this last week ...but some things are not so great. I downloaded and installed Amule with help from [member=7109]Moltke[/member] and it runs, jumps, does back flips and is generally doing exactly what it's supposed to BUT I have just discovered that it's installed to /home and that Wine and MT4 also want to join the party.

When I set up the partitions, I was under the impression that as I was using a separate drive to store all my documents and data the /home directory was almost redundant... so I deliberately made the Root directory as big as I could (0n my 30gb mSATA) at 23gb and thought that as I was never going to use it, just 4gb seemed more than enough for /home.  Now I find that half of that has gone and that I'll probably be  running out of room quite soon whilst Root has plenty.

Obviously, I can just make /home bigger and Root smaller but I don't get why this is happening and would rather have all my programmes in one place. Is this unavoidable?...or am I just being dense?

[cantagril]

In the absence of any reaction (and needing to finish my installation) I've just reinstalled - again - and resized the partitions leaving 11gb for /home, which I hope will be sufficient.

[Moltke]

Moi again.

OK, so lots things are going right with my new LL installation -  n°5 in this last week ...but some things are not so great. I downloaded and installed Amule with help from [member=7109]Moltke[/member] and it runs, jumps, does back flips and is generally doing exactly what it's supposed to BUT I have just discovered that it's installed to /home and that Wine and MT4 also want to join the party.

When I set up the partitions, I was under the impression that as I was using a separate drive to store all my documents and data the /home directory was almost redundant... so I deliberately made the Root directory as big as I could (0n my 30gb mSATA) at 23gb and thought that as I was never going to use it, just 4gb seemed more than enough for /home.  Now I find that half of that has gone and that I'll probably be  running out of room quite soon whilst Root has plenty.

Obviously, I can just make /home bigger and Root smaller but I don't get why this is happening and would rather have all my programmes in one place. Is this unavoidable?...or am I just being dense?

Don't know about amule cause have never used it but wine's not just another regular program, I think it does that for security reasons, after all uses some foreign microsoft Libraries not native on Linux and even creates its own "virtual drive" which may somehow corrupt, mess with or damage  the sysytem if installed with the rest, i.e in /usr/lib instead of /home, snaps and flatpacks do this as well, of course, this is just me speculating but I think it makes sense, doesn't it? Read here for a better understanding  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)  and here https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ

[cantagril]

Thanks...again

I have done a bit of reading and I'm possibly closer to getting the /home and/or  /root dichotomy but that has led me to wonder just why one bothers with /root at all for progs....this on the basis that nasty stuff can damage your health if it's in /root and not so much if it's in /home.

Anyway, I'm gradually making progress and this is leading me to more and stupider questions. :-[

[Moltke]

Thanks...again

I have done a bit of reading and I'm possibly closer to getting the /home and/or  /root dichotomy but that has led me to wonder just why one bothers with /root at all for progs....this on the basis that nasty stuff can damage your health if it's in /root and not so much if it's in /home.

Anyway, I'm gradually making progress and this is leading me to more and stupider questions. :-[

There are no such things as stupid questions, the only stupid thing to do is not to ask them Well, I think the word "root" is self explanatory; as the root of a tree where it's based the whole structure of it and which can't live without, such is the "/root" filesystem in Linux, where every important/relevant file for the system to function properly resides. If you plan on installing lots of programs, then getting a larger HDD/SDD might just be what you need to do. If for whatever reason that's not possible, then consider making priorities regarding which programs you really need as well as finding some lighter and smaller alternatives. For example, those  you can start/use form within a terminal are little in size and very lightweight. I use a few ones. It might be a bit challenging at first but it's doable and depending on the app the learning curve isn't too hard. For example, I use cmus https://github.com/cmus/cmus which is a music player that runs from the terminal and works great; it's pretty fast and easy to use. Its installed size is barely a few KBs and it uses very little RAM. Here's a nice tutorial https://www.increasinglyadequate.com/cmus.html