An Introductory Guide to Understanding, Navigating, and Using the Linux File System
What is a File System – the quick overview
A file system is the way that a computers operating system organizes files on its physical media. On a Windows computer, if you open the File Explorer and then click on This PC you will see the physical media attached to the computer. Normal Windows home computers organize their file systems with the physical drive at the top level of the file structure. That is to say, the C: drive will contain your entire file system and any additional drives will usually just contain user media such as pictures and videos or are used for installing software. Double clicking the Local Disk (C:) will open up the main Windows file system and you will normally see at least four Folders named Program Files, Program Files (x86) Users and Windows. These are the top levels of the Windows File Structure and everything is broken down from there.
Linux on the other hand does not care so much about your physical media and instead uses what is called a logical file system. This means that when you look at the file structure it looks the same regardless of how it is physically installed on hard drives. You might have two or three hard drives, a RAID, or some other physical setup and the logical file system will work and look the same.
I’m going to avoid talking in detail about the underlying filesystem itself, rather we are going to look at it from a basic user point of view. The type of filesystem depends a lot on the distribution of Linux being used. Most Debian based distros (including Ubuntu and Kali) use the Ext4 filesystem while most Redhat and related distros such as Rocky or CentOS use the XFS fileystem. For the average user, there is pretty much no real difference. The actual file structure, what we call the filesystem hierarchy, is pretty much the same across most distributions of Linux. For this article I am using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.