Linux vs Windows File System Structure Compared!

oh sorry if i'm looking a little shiny today uh it is a 110 degrees outside so let's try to get through this here in this video what i'm going to be doing is talking about file system structures and what i'm going to do is compare the windows file system structure with the linux file system structure this is a video that i wish i would have stumbled across when i was first getting into linux because what i'm going to do is try to find some equivalencies in the root directories of these two systems so we could get a better understanding of what is going on in the linux file system structure oh forgot to mention algorithm like this video so right now we are looking at both windows explorer and nemo running in linux mint these are going to be our file explorers and throughout this video we're going to be comparing different directories granted the structures and the functionalities of the directories do differ in numerous ways but it is going to be nice to kind of compare some of the similarities between different directories so that we can contrast and kind of get a good idea of how everything works and with that said this is generally the page that you're going to get when you open up either a file explorer in linux versus windows in windows here i do have my default set to this pc but sometimes or depending on your configuration you might have it go to quick access which will show your frequent folders and your frequent files or you'll be in this pc and it will show your user files here as well as your device and drives while in linux it generally defaults to the home directory for the specific user that you're logged into now to get to the comparal directory in windows to get here what we're going to want to do is go to our local disk go under users and then go to your actual user and here you will see all your user directories and now these two directories here basically serve the same function where you can store your documents your downloads your pictures your movies all that fun stuff but what i want to show you real quick is how you get to this directory from your file system or from your root directory within linux the primary difference here from the root directory the naming of it is home instead of users but then you have your username and you are in this user directory now the similarities do kind of expand beyond this so if i bring in my windows file explorer here and i go to view and then show the hidden items we're given our app data folder and here is where a lot of your actual profile local data is stored for example if i go over to mozilla firefox you can see a section for the profiles within that and there's actually a lot more if you're familiar with like minecraft modding a lot of that stuff is in here and this is the primary hidden directory within your actual user profile now linux kinda has the same thing they're called dot files if i go to view and then i show the hidden files this will give me access to those dot files and the primary purpose for these is to store your individual user configuration or specific application profiles such as what we saw in windows so an example of this is either dot cinnamon which will have our cinnamon configuration we have dot config which in here there's quite a few different things stored that we can go ahead and customize here such as our nemo configs things like that but if we go ahead and go back one that is pretty popular to go ahead and play around with is your dot bash rc file bash rc is basically the terminal shell that you're probably running right now if you're running linux there are other ones such as fish but bash rc seems to be the most popular one an example of editing this configuration file if i go ahead and open the terminal here you can see that there is nothing special going on but doing a simple bash rc configuration edit we could type something in like neofetch and then we'll actually execute this command when we go ahead and open up bashrc so if i go and save the file and i open up the terminal again you can see that it ran the neofetch program and that's just one really simple example of a configuration edit within the linux file system and one thing you may have noticed is i didn't need to sudo or root or type any passwords to go ahead and do that because if you're working in your home user directory you have full control over all these files and you can do whatever you want without any elevated privileges so now what we're going to do is talk about one of the most important and fundamental differences between these two file systems and that is how your drives are connected to the file system in windows here you could see that all the drives are separated and they're marked by a specific letter the c drive is your main drive or basically your root drive and then anything else that's connected to your system is going to be given a separate letter and be separated from your main file system this example i have here in windows is actually a windows usb installer with the drive d you can see that this file system is completely separate from our local disk c which is our main system directory while if we go ahead and look at linux it is working in a completely different way additional drives usbs hard drives or anything like that is actually going to be mounted within your root file system so instead of the separation we see here some of the directories within this file system are actually going to be where specific drives are mounted and the two that we're going to be looking at right now is the mount directory and the media directory when you go ahead and plug in a usb insert a cd drive or whatever it's generally going to be controlled or mounted in the media directory right here and the media directory is controlled by the distribution itself while the mount directory is the user defined mounting points a situation that you'd want to define a mounting point is if you have something like a backup hard drive in your system and you wanted it to automatically mount all the time this directory is a great mounting point and you would do this by editing the fstab file or the fs tab file sorry and i do have a separate tutorial on how to do that and i'm going to show you an example real quick if we go into this media mounting point and we go under my username you can see that there is nothing here but what i'm going to do real quick is i'm going to insert the virtual box guest additions disk just so we can see an example of something mounting so i went ahead and just now inserted that and we should be getting a pop-up dialog if asking us if we want to run it now i'm going to hit cancel for now and then right here under devices you can see that it is separated but this is actually just a shortcut to a directory within this root directory so if we go over to media which like we said is the one that your distribution manages and we go to brandon we can see that we have our virtual box guest edition disk directory mounted here we open that up and we can see all of the files and separate directories within that directory so instead of having something completely separate like in windows where if i open this up it is its own disk right here we have something that looks a little bit like this media brandon and then that drives directory now my primary examples were shown in these two media and mount drives and these are generally the directories that you're going to want to use when mounting drives but that doesn't mean you have to use them necessarily a lot of the times then one thing that's really cool about linux is you can like set up your home directory to be a completely separate drive that is mounted on your system so if anything goes wrong with anything else or you want to change distributions or anything like that this could be a completely separate drive so your entire user profile all your dot files and all your important documents or whatever are on a completely separate drive than the drive that your linux distribution is actually installed on all right so next we're going to go ahead and talk about program files now in windows we have program files and program files x86 depending on the architecture that the programs were written for and in these program file folders we can see both system-wide and user-installed programs now there's actually some pretty decent equivalencies within the linux unix file system here and that's going to be into folders so let's go ahead and take a look at those the first one is going to be this opt folder now this is going to be the program files or the applications and software that the user actually went ahead and installed so on this system the only things i have manually installed is the vbox guest edition drivers and google maps so you can see google earth pro and here are those program files to make it so that the google earth application can run and it kind of looks the same in windows if we go into program files and open up a random application such as caden live these are those specific program files now additionally there's another folder that we can go ahead and take a look at and that is going to be either bin or s-bin and what these are are folders or directories that contain various binaries for programs that are installed by default in your system s bin means system bin i'm pretty sure and bin is just bin now in here you can see applications a lot of them are applications you're going to want to run from the terminal such as apt-get and there's others such as mv cat cat so if i go over to the cs we can see cat is in here and there's others such as the directory modifying commands such as move remove copy paste things like that so overall those are the program files equivalencies in linux now from here on out it gets much more difficult to kind of match up various equivalencies between the different file systems because all we really have left here is windows in windows this is your operating system but even with that said there are some equivalencies we could kind of match up here and the most obvious one is boot so in this boot directory are the files and configuration that are required to make windows go ahead and boot up and we kind of have the same thing going on over here in the boot directory this is where all of our grub stuff is stored including the essential files configurations well system-wide configurations and things like that now for another equivalency and i'm going to be kind of stretching here a little bit but that is these lib folders here these are your libraries so these are helpful libraries that are used by the system and the best thing i could compare them to is if i go into the trusty system 32 folder these are all the dll files that basically make windows run and these are kind of the equivalent to these library files here and after those there's it's really hard to come up with equivalencies and comparing to the windows file structure in the actual windows directory because everything's really spread out so the only thing i can really do going forward is kind of explain what some of these directories are very briefly because it's kind of hard to match up windows equivalents at this point and we'll start up with cd and rom right here like we explained earlier with mount points this is another mount point that's not really used anymore but it's kind of just left there for compatibility reasons and right here we have dev and what this is is your hardware disks webcams things like that whatever hardware in your system that's plugged in is gonna be recognized in here as a file and this all goes all the way down to something like if we go over to the s's the sda even separate partitions have specific files in here that kind of link to those devices the etc folder or etc is going to be your system-wide configuration files you will be playing around in here a little bit but to edit anything in here you're going to want to do that as a super user and from here we've talked about all of these up till process or the proc folder and this is where it's going to contain a lot of your system information so if i go ahead and open that up and scroll down to the bottom for example i can find things such as partitions open up this file and i can see some information on various partitions in my system if i scroll up a little bit more i can find cpu info here and then get information on the cpu that's in my system and even if you wanted to you could view these files using the cat command in the terminal so from there that takes us to root now this is just your user well the roots user directory right here which that's there mostly to separate it from the actual home directory so if you did end up having this on a separate hard drive the root directory or the root user directory is not connected with that home directory from there we have run which this is actually the directory that things that are located in ram is stored so essentially everything in here is temporary and when you shut off and turn on your system all this is going to be refreshed now srv or service data you're probably not going to use that that much but if you do things with servers or ftp clients or anything like that it may store some data in there sys is just a system folder tmpr or is a location where temporary files can be stored usr is system-wide read-only files and then var is variable data files so your system actually writes into this directory as time goes on then right here at least in my system we have a swap file but just for the sake of time i'm not going to get into that right now all right so i do thank you very much for watching i hope that this has helped you out in some sort of way to get a better idea of the concepts between these different structures if it did not let me know if i explained something wrong let me know down below or if you know of any better equivalencies to kind of compare these two please let me know down in the comments below with all that please subscribe and ring that bell so you do not miss any future uploads with all of that said have a wonderful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 27,508

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, desktop enviorment, windows, file system, etx4 vs nsft

Id: K71WCq-g77U

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021