I have a SSD and HDD in my system. I dual booted my kubuntu and windows 10. In Kubuntu I gave 30 GB space from my SSD for the / folder and 540 GB from my HDD to the Home directory. So, in which directory the programs I install go in. Please help.
2 Answers
Programs that you install via apt
usually go to /
.
30Gb in /
would possibly be enough, but that very much depends on what applications you use.
There are other applications that you decide where to place (or even have both options, an apt
installer and also alternative zip/installers), e.g. eclipse, anaconda, android studio, etc.
You would probably want these to be in /home
.
There is no single procedure for all of them, you have to look for each one.
Three examples here:
- For eclipse, follow instructions under How to install Eclipse manually on Ubuntu here, or here.
- For anaconda, follow instructions here.
- For android studio, follow instructions here.
Likewise for others, you should search for something like "ubuntu install home eclipse".
See also this.

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Thank you for your help. But how do i change the path of installation of anaconda, eclipse, and android studio. – Anuj Tambe Oct 13 '21 at 05:56
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@AnujTambe - Please see edited answer. – sancho.s ReinstateMonicaCellio Oct 13 '21 at 10:47
Short answer: leave it up to the system.
Programs installed via Software Center are installed in system folders under the /
folder. These system folders are defined in the software packages. In order to change these folder paths, you would need to repackage a program.
When working with different partitions for /
and /home
, you must make sure to provision sufficient on /
for the software you want to install. In principle, the 30 GB you have foreseen typically is well enough to accomodate the system and plenty of software.
To control and accommodate allocation of where software is installed yourself requires sufficient technical knowledge of the system
- As already indicated, to change the actual installation paths requires repackaging the software.
- Alternatively, you can always connect different partitions to different parts of the root file system through symlinking. In the old days of unix, where drives were small,
/usr
typically was on a separate partition. That is why we still see both/bin
and/usr/bin
folders, which only in very recent times were actually "unified" in Ubuntu by linking/bin
to/usr/bin
.
Programs that you install manually outside of the software sources, should be installed under /usr/local
or under /opt
. Programs that come with a setup script quite commonly install under /opt
. For example, Google Chrome is installed under /opt/google
. To place an executable in the search PATH, a symlink is placed under usr/bin
that link back to the actual executable /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
.

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