What folders do you make in addition to the default ones ?

I make an /all/ directory as a catchall for things that don't fit elsewhere, since is used by so many automatic softwares and config files, I like having a place that only I'll write to.

I also make /bin for general use and /all/GitHub/ for software I install from GitHub.

~/bin/ which I add to my $PATH

~/Scripts for any bash or python scripts
~/Gits for any repos I clone
~/Projects for any projects im working on (not organized by programming language, but I do have some dirs called zig, go, etc., for when im learning a new language and want to make some projects for learning purposes)

Most other files go into ~/Documents if they don’t have a home already, or don’t fit into the above directories

Public - for everything im seeding and sharing

Apps - for all app images

Games - for all lutris spam and random failed attempts at installing mods.

$HOME/temp, $HOME/git, ln -s $HOME/git/scripts $HOME/scripts

I'm a ~/tmp man myself.

~/Projects which has everything I ever cloned or started. yes, it's getting kind of painful to backup :D

~/code for code

~/dots for git-backed nix configs

~/.rt for projects compiled locally ("runtime")

~/Screencast for recordings of my screen

I also create a ~/.shrc.bash symlink that points to ~/dots/bash/bashrc that reats ~/dots/bash/*.bash and sources the files

~/.shenv.bash where I keep environment (computer) specific settings

Separate folders in the download one. One for each app. And a separate /home/sync folder with the same app separation folders to safekeep the backups of android apps and DCIM folder.

~/tmp

~/temp

~/temper

~/tempest

~/misc

/mnt/other (symlinked)

/datapool or whatever the array is called for zfs pools, I often do /mail on mail servers, and /www on web servers. Not sure why but it makes it super obvious what's going on when you login remotely

~/Homework (porn)

~/aaaaaaa (porn)

~/Stuff (memes, with a porn subfolder)

~/misc (work docs, study docs, forms, some porn)

/ram - tmpfs filesystem
~/.local/bin - added to my path
~/.local/software - any user-local program more complicated than a binary gets a directory here. Generally a binary would be symlinked to ~/.local/bin
~/.local/venv - shared python venv to use for one liners and small scripts
~/repo - local filesystem backed package repository for which the host system is configured to install from
~/.local/repo - local filesystem backed package repository for which the host system is not configured to install from (used for mock, VMs, and external systems).
/overflow - Used to point to a large secondary hard drive (back when having a small ssd was the economical thing to do. Nowadays, it is just where my large directories go cause I can't be bothered to get used to a more sane setup

~/nixos/ for my NixOS config ~/repos/ for git repos ~/audio/ for my sound library and recordings

Archive

Archive archive

Archive_11_2025

I am not good at organizing

I don't, on most machines, which are servers of some sort. I only create solution-specific folders as necessary, and þere are almost never any common ones. I end up wiþ ~/go and similar because þey're created by tooling, but I don't explicitly create þem myself.

For my PCs, I've been carrying forward my ${HOME} for over a decade. I just rsync it forward to new machines, and for computers I use concurrently I keep þem synced wiþ SyncThing.

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren't mature enough to have their own repo)

At least two of these:
\ ~/Stuff
\ ~/Stuffs
\ ~/Stuffz
\ ~/Shits

~/Stuff(1) as well?
- No, ofc not, I'm not a degenerate without a plan!!
  \ This isn't a game.

~/Brojetos (anything relating to making stuff, writing, drawing, video creation, programming, etc., professional or personal)

~/temp (a non-hidden temp folder with a script that wipes it when the PC shuts down or reboots, used for downloads and such to prevent the "downloads folder is an abomination" problem that plagues any computer after a while of usage)

~/AppsGames (appimages, applications compiled from source and not installed to system, personal use scripts, wineprefixes, non-steam games)

aaaand ~/OtherAminals (for stuff I want to keep but have no idea where else to place)

My homedir is an infernal hellhole of junk accumulated over the past 15 years and I wouldn't have it any other way

Mine used to be like that, but now my home folder is rehabilitated by turning ~/Documents into a hellhole of accumulated junk instead.
Mine used to be the same but the last OS reinstall I reset everything, moved my files onto an external drive, and only copied them over on a needs basis. I'd been keeping the same home dir since I was like 4 or however old I was when I started using a computer. So needless to say there was a lot there that made me cringe to see every time I tried to navigate my files.
I'd love to keep it clean but too many devs think $HOME is up for grabs, as long as they prepend their directory names with a dot (they think I'll never notice, but I notice, and I keep a list...)
- Dafuq are you doing in other people's homes?
  Sysadmins are all creeps, confirmed
There are 15 year olds using Lemmy??
/s (my documents folder is the same, but older ... much a lot too many very older :|)

~/dev for code
~/work for things I don't want to do, like taxes

I do similarly, but I use '_{/Development' only because I accidentally fucked up my '/dev' dir once using '}/dev'
- Ohh good point. Maybe I should switch to ~/code

~/proj
~/note
~/sync
~/docs (/book etc)
~/imgs ~/util ~/test ~/temp

Code goes in the Developer folder

(I got used to that name on macOS, where it is the "canonical" name for it, because it automatically gets a special icon)

Multiple people in this topic say they organise in directories for different programming languages, something I have never considered and I find it to be an odd way of organising for some reason I can't explain.

Where do you put a project with a Javascript frontend and a Python backend?

In a folder called javpy, of course!
for me I consider that a web project so it goes into the typescript folder, if it's backend only then python
- Why group it into language instead of say a 'web' directory or 'android'/'mobile'?
  I'm just curious, I am more of a 'throw everything in one directory and home I remember what I'm looking for' sort of organiser.
Since projects of the same language often use the same tooling this makes it easier to clean up the whole directory by running something like this:
bash

for d in ./*/ ; do (cd "$d" && somecommand); done
somecommand could be cargo clean if you're in the Rust directory for example.

~/3D Objects

My home folders on any OS have a Development folder (which conveniently sits right next to Documents and Downloads) and in that folder, I’ve also got subfolders per programming language that have the respective projects in them.

The other folder I usually have is SyncThing with whatever synced folders are relevant for that machine.

Having a development folder is such a good idea that I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. Thanks for the idea.
Mine is dev. I avoid capitalizing folder names.
Yep, I also have a directory for my programming projects on each of my machines, but mine is Programming. On my main desktop, I also have an ISOs folder to hold my OS ISOs for VMs and old CD-ROM game ISOs.

~/{nextcloud,git,pictures/screenshots,music,docs,videos}

In terms of what I manually create. Dot directories normally get automatically created but I guess I'd create a ~/.config if it didn't get created.

I just at ~/projects it contains a boat load of stuff including my Neovim and bash stuff.

Guys, use GNU Stow + git for your configs shit's good.

Have you tried chezmoi?

~/Projects

~/Transfer

for SyncThing

I have /home/username/username/ and I sym link important dirs (like Downloads) to my new home. I strongly dislike all the dot files and dirs cluttering up my home dir.

Are you aware of the ‘xdg-user-dirs-update’ command that allows you to edit the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs config file?
- Huh, no, I had no idea that was there. Thank you.
- Can you expand on this ?

I usually create ~/git/{github,gitlab,codeberg,AUR,etc} where I clone the git stuff I need.

The rest is usually handled by my nextcloud that creates the ~/Nextcloud folder.

I rsync my home folder across installs. These are my standard extra folders.

~/Books, with subfolders by topic.

~/Comics, with subfolders by publisher, then by title, possibly with an intermediate folder for author or franchise.

~/Programming, with subfolders by language, then project.

~/diy for my collection of knitting, crochet and sewing patterns and other assorted diy stuff

~/work duh.

~/tools for my collection of more or less useful small scripts

~/sync for my syncthing folders

~/data symlink to my data partition (most of the others are also symlinks to their location on data)

I don't really have a convention for programming projects yet. They used to land inside of ~/diy or in ~/tools or just random folders on data. I've got a ~/code folder now, but its contents are a mess.

Always backup your tools folder... In the past I only created backups for my "real" code folder and I was quite upset when I lost my small scripts in the last drive death.

~/ linux iso's

~/Homework

I just call it ~/Porn.
- porn gets its own directory under ~/videos

~/autoclean and a cron job to delete everything older than 7+ days from there. I can just download whatever, throw it in a special folder and it's gone after few days. Keeps my ~/Downloads a bit more clean, easy to store temp txt files to keep track of what I currently have on hand and so on.

I remove files and folders older than 30 days in my Downloads folder. But my work does make me download things that I often only need for less than a day. If I need to keep something, then it goes into whatever folder or online service where it should be. It is deleted to my trash bin and that has another 30 days before being permanently deleted. I haven't had to pick anything out of the trash just yet.

Projects for all kinds of projects

aur_builds for the package I use from the AUR. No hand holding here, I build and install my AUR packages artisanally.

I build paru-bin manually, then it upgrades itself, very handy 😎

I always make a ~/.local/{bin,opt,share} if the distro lacks it. and a ~/bot that I use for my development stuff

Ahh, a ~/.local/opt folder makes so much sense. I'm currently just using a ~/.opt folder, same purpose.
- yea it makes it so much easier since there's only one user in the system anyway so makes no sense for everything to be installed system level
Why bot?
- The majority of my development work is on chat bots or sites so I've always just used bot as the name

I just live out of my downloads folder until its time to back up the important stuff to the server and reinstall/ distrohop.

projects, games, and programs are the non default folders in mine

I always make a bin folder in my home for putting my custom scripts and downloaded binaries. At least on fedora, ~/bin is already in the path, so I don't have to make any additional configuration to make stuff in there become commands for my cli

Apps (local executables, appimages, etc.), Projects (Work, hobbies), Sync (things I need everywhere), tmp (files I will probably delete sooner than later), and Data. Also Vaults and Boxes, only if I need them.

Outside of some folders I made specifically because an app required it, I have a "games" folder for most of my games and a ".lutriswine" folder to have Lutris use a different directory from Wine.

~/Projects - for my coding projects

~/Qt - which holds the Qt framework

~/Torrents - For torrents that I share

i have a 'src' directory. tho my home directory is extremely messy, ls | wc -l gives me 170 now..

I have internal RAID1s that store at least two directories apart from any OS or home dev.

../repos ../misc

Misc contain timestamp fstabs, mdadm.conf, rust/python/apt user-inatalled package names, among other notes and small files.

I also sync my master org directory between my documents snapshots and the repos dir

~/.drafts, in which my text editor taskbar shortcut script creates files YYMMDD_text_N. I passionately believe in eliminating the chore of manually naming my spur-of-the-moment notes and text files.

~/progs or ~/bin where loose programs not provided by my package manager reside.

If there's a secondary drive, /media/disk1 as the mount point in fstab.

Your organization will vary with your usage. If you're looking for something suitable for work, I would highly recommend the PARA approach. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/

I've tweaked it to my needs. Combined with fzf, it makes my workflow so smooth and efficient. https://www-gem.codeberg.page/sys_stay_organized/

I want to follow this, and I sorta do... but ADHD makes the P,A and other A basically the same category. And the R is just "stuff I put down to look at but haven't yet".
- Drawing the line between each category indeed takes some time. Our brain is not use to this approach anymore. Perseverance is key, but it's kind of a commitment.

~/dev

~/dev/oss

~/dev/work

~/dev/personal

For source code or any project - a folder Projects (on my personal setups) or Documents/Projects/PersonalRepo (more customer specific folders under the Projects sub-folder)

Anything under ~/Projects that isn’t just a throwaway will be a git repo.
Anything under ~/Documents/Project/*Repo will be a git repo.

From back when I used to freelance as a photo and video editor. ~/Media which was a mount point for my second hard drive with all the personal and paid customer's I was working on, it was a mix of Music, Photos and Videos that I was creating, but not consuming if that makes sense.

Just a remnant from back when I had a small SSD with my OS and a second larger mechanical drive for everything else

Under ~ I usually make ~/Application for flatpaks/appimages etc, ~/Script for any kind of script I write in bash, python, or whatever else, ~/Audio for audio/music production stuff, and ~/Games for emulators and such. ~/Documents is reserved for actual documents containing text data usually.

~/Prototypes for ... my prototypes, typically either starting from an empty directory or cloning a repository and adapting it for my needs. I have this directory on nearly all my devices, desktop of course but also NAS, server, phone, standalone XR headset, etc.
~/Apps in addition to ~/bin, typically binaries but all AppImages

I usually make src, junk, and applications for appimages and unpackaged binaries

I do a similar thing for code stuffs, generally always make a ~/Git and ~/Godot so I always have a spot for things.

I also delete most of the auto-created ones if I'm using a DE that does that, because I have my own organization going on with various external/network drives. Only one I have always kept is ~/Downloads.

Okay what is this <sub> convention everyone is using and why is it sometimes </sub> ?
- I'm not sure exactly what you're asking about. Do you mean the directory names?
  In unix, ~ expands to the user's home directory path and / just separates each level in the path.

I have ~/work/code/project-name-1, ~/work/code/project-name-2 or ~/priv/code/project-name-3, but not by language... I only separate work and private repositories.

I usually make ~/Packages for various binary packages that I can't add as repos for whatever reason. And ~/Packages/src for stuff I compile myself.

And ~/Games for games.

Conventions I have are:

Downloads folder is ephemeral, don't store/keep things in there I might want
~/scripts - personal scripts and one offs
~/Documents/projects/[subdir] - any tech project I may be working on, gets homed here
/tmp - always mount it noexec

I also start off allocating ~ 50GB to / (root) volumegroup. Wine and proton have been taking up nearly the full space though, may need to expand it on my desktop soon.

Usually git or development.

~/repos

Defaults are good for me but I like mounting my secondary drive to ~/Storage with subfolders media, projects, games

I have a test folder where I clone various git repisitories, compile programs from source or test some small scripts.

A gits dir and a dir called "wd". Short for working dir.

Its a dumpfest of scripts, tomls, yamls, directories galore. The gits dir is where I keep my cmdb, that one is organized. wd is like a playground where I allow myself not to give a shit

I have one for my git repos that I clone and keep building from source. One for various projects. One for scripts…. And so on

I have repos for things I’ve cloned from codeberg or other repositories.

There’s also Nextcloud for files I’ve synced from there.