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

[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